What Lighting?
 

My target is the most vibrant SPS colors I can achieve just taking lighting into consideration. From what I understand, the bright SPS colors are what the coral uses to protect itself from the sun's rays...? So, the brighter the light (among other parameters) the more vibrant the colors...?

Now, considering my tank is 36"x18"x24" making it a 65 gallon, I was thinking because of the 36" length it would be best to use T5 lighting. If i\I use Metal Halide I will only use ONE BULB. So, taking the length into consideration...what should I use?

~ 7 - T5s?
~ 250W HQI pendant
~ 400W HQI pendant (not a lot of bulb choice with this one)

Or use SE bulbs and overdrive them with HQI ballasts? What will give me the highest PAR?

HO T5's will give you a huge range of options for bulbs as well as a very high level of penetration if you go with a set that has individual M shaped reflectors. Most will come in even number bulb configurations, so either 6 or 8 is what you're looking at.
If it's not individual reflectors, then MH would be a better option.

Yes, if I went with T5s I would go with individual reflectors. The Sunlight Supply Tek T5 6-bulb, or this other brand that J&L Aquatics has just started carrying that I can't remember the name of...they come in odd numbered bulbs. I do like the variance of the bulbs, and I have seen some AMAZINGLY colored SPS under intense T5 lighting.

I am running Giesemann T5 bulbs right now, and have found that they have yellowed A LOT. They are now just 5 months old. I'm not happy with the Giesemanns. Currently, my fixture is just a Hagen brand GLO T5 fixture, but it does the trick.

From personal experience if you want good colours and great growth from your corals go with MH. I would think a 250w MH HQI Hamilton bulb would do nicely. All I know is that our zoos (that we have) and the sps corals (that we had, sold them) would not grow under T5's. The light was so poor for the sps they started to die off, again just our experience. Ended up moving them to the tank with MH and not only did they start coming back but they got lots of new growth. Our lps corals and most softies and our anemone have done great under the T5's. I do find that (personally) I like the look of the MH better, I find it's more of a blue light whereas the t5's seem a little bit more yellow. Although we have had other people over to our house and they like the look of our corals under our T5's better then our MH, so really I find it's more of a personal preference.

Is there a reason you only want to use 1 bulb? It will work, but two bulbs on a 36" tank will give you a real nice coverage. I would go with 250 watt, in the bulb of your choice to provide the color you are looking for. Personally I love the AB 10K bulbs but they are hard to find around here. T5s are Ok, but spend the money and go MH with T5's to supplement the color.

Steve

The cost of a single MH setup with bulb is cheaper than a 6 bulb T5 fixture with bulbs. I also will not spend more than $500 including bulb(s). I can't justify spending more than that on my "hobby". I refuse to buy 2 MH for my 65 because of the simple fact that it is a 36" tank. Since each halide lights a 24x24" patch I see it as a waste of light (and the reduce, reuse, and recycle part of me doesn't like to waste electricity either lol). This is why I figured that if I went with halide maybe I should go with a 400W HQI, and I may get a bit better coverage, but I have only been able to find one bulb around here and it is a 20K...I don't want to run a 20K. But right now I am leaning towards a T5 fixture.

That is funny...I grow SPS under my current T5 lighting and it does quite well, especially considering I only have 2.4 W per gallon of T5. T5s come in all sorts of Kelvin as do MH. These Giesemann T5 bulbs are the first ones that I have had trouble with them yellowing with age. This may be because I am running a Midday (6000K) and a single Pure Actinic. It didn't look yellow when they were new though as the Pure Actinic is very blue.

IMO 400w mh for my old 65g was enough light to grow sps it all depends on what kind of sps you are trying to grow if digi and monti t5 is good. If you look at the euro tanks they all run t5 but keep in mind that they run 8-10 t5 at 84w ea that's comparable to us running 2x250 or 2x400 with t5 supplementation I currently run 1000w for a 120g and find it suffiecient also if you run t5 for your tank and wish to have sps thrive then you need awesome flow and to feed the sps with ultralith or similiar types aswell as prodibio.

If you're unhappy with the giesmann bulbs, check ATI or URI bulbs. They're the ones I'm using and they have great colour output and I've had them for a bit more than 6 months without any hint of yellow.

I love the KZ (Korallen-Zucht) T5 bulbs. I added just one Fiji Purple and it made a real difference. That's the true genius of T5 :)

I thought the genius of T5 was there energy savings and money savings :)

If i every go for more lighting than the MH pendant for the big tank I am going to buy T5, but I am going for a spotlighted type thing in a big tank, wish to see how it works out.

not really, you end up having to put more wattage over the tank and still have less intensity, better and more even coverage, but less intensity.

tank a 2X2 tank as an example, 1 250 watt MH will light the heck out of it.

it would take say 12 T5's to evenly light it, which works out to 288 watts.

now going from the same perspective a MH pendant could be raised to light a 3X3 area at about the same intensity as a T5 set up sitting right on the top. in this situation the MH would be way more power friendly for the same intensity as even if you used 12 bulbs, and stretched them out a bit, it would be 468 watts.

also when you look at time for bulb replacement, at a 1 year interval the MH would be say 80 to 100 bucks a year buying locally, 12, T5 bulbs would be 252.00 (24" bulbs) to replace (and that is a J&L prices which are about 15 bucks a bulb cheaper than the Island) say you do your T5's every 18 months the MH is still cheaper to replace. so for me it would be 384.00 to replace 12 T5 bulbs, also the chemical pollution of disposing of that many bulbs is way worse so environmentally the less bulbs we can get away with the better.

Steve

I stand...well sit sipping tea...corrected :) guess i'm not going to switch.

The T5 bulb replacement is what eats ya! T5s aren't cheaper than MH. That is not why I'm leaning towards them. The main two reasons I am leaning towards T5 instead of MH is bulb color choices, and heat.

I don't think this is accurate. I'm actually going to take a closer look at PAR levels in the ole MH/T5 debate, but I'm pretty sure that comparing W to W you need a bit less T5 to get the same intensity as the MH. One 250w MH over a 24x24x24" I think would be far less PAR than twelve 39w T5s. I can't even imagine how bright twelve T5s would be over that space!!! I actually don't think it would fit.

I have seen several VERY nice SPS Euro tanks lit by 6-8 W per gallon with 24-30" depth.

Flow is not a problem, and is about the easiest and cheapest thing to provide for them. :D I do plan on running some sort of supplementation system. I'm leaning towards ZEOvit right now, but I'm not keen on the daily maintenance of it. Looking at options right now. I currently do feed the ZEOvit Amino Acids, and SeaChem Reef Plus (at 10% dosage). I have noticed quite a difference upon adding each additive, which I did at different times.

Awesome! I was going to try ti URI next, so it's good that there are some good reviews from them. I was really disappointed in the yellowing I've gotten from my Giesemann bulbs.

I haven't seen this brand of bulbs (but they have supplements don't they?) around here. I'll send an email to J&L...see if they can track em down.

Now that I think about it our SPS might of done poorly because of all the other types corals we have in our tank. Chemical warfare was probably more to blame then the lights. :redface:

Chemical warfare sucks. Don't forget your carbon! Speaking of which...

My AquaClear (which runs my carbon and PhosBan) wasn't working today so I ripped it apart, cleaned it out, and put it back together. Upon doing so I realised I was not running any carbon, and my PhosBan hasn't been changed for a couple months. Now that I have both of those changed, my water isn't looking yellow. So..............it wasn't the Giesemanns yellowing out on me after all. :redface: LOL!

actually, it is very accurate, I took my PAR meter down to Safari pets and did a direct comparison between PC/T5/MH the 250 watt MH still had almost twice the PAR at twice the distance, and yes it was high output T5. I will say though that the T5 impressed me enough for me to buy one and put it on my fresh water planted tank as it had 40% more output as the same size of PC.

If you do a search on "watt per gallon" you are going to see a lot of rants from me about it as it is a totally useless measurement and or comparison that in no way relates to anything except the exact same type of lighting at the exact same color temp on the exact same dimension tank.

I usually ignore this but there is a lot of people using this lately that are fairly new to the board, so I will explain it again for there benefit.

first some preamble.

no matter how many lights you add you will not increase the intensity of the light unless you go to a different type of lighting. what you will do is spread the same intensity level over a larger area and create a more even lighting.

Intensity of the light is its penetrating power at a specific distance. When we measure PAR we are measuring the intensity not the total amount, because the total amount means nothing unless it has the power to punch down to the depth you need.

this is why you can grow SPS under NO lights in very shallow tanks, but you can't in deeper tanks.

so on to watt/gal

lets say we have a 100 watt light bulb on a 33 gal tank, thats 3.03 watt per gal, right

so lets look at a classic 33 gal tank 18" tall, then look at my 33 gal tank it is 22.5" tall, and finally lets look at a tank that is 36" tall, 18" wide and 12" front to back (tall 33) they all have the same "watt/gal, but do you think you could grow SPS at the bottom of the 36" tall one? but now if we upgraded from 100 watts of NO to 100 watts of T5 we could maybe get something in the middle tank if we did put it to deep, but still the last example would take more punch.

Which is where MH come in.. the intensity of a MH is not matched by tubs in any way. The MH can penetrate farther down, which is what really matters to us. Do you necessarily need this power, no, but you might

If you want to keep high light corals on the middle of your tank then yes T5's will be good, but if you want to keep some on the bottom of your tank, you will be better off with MH.

take an example from the planted fresh water tank forums, they start out with shop lights and low light plants, then they add better lights (T8's) and find they need CO2. so they get plants that are higher light plants and find light is the limiting factor, so they upgrade to VHO/PC/T5's and use more CO2. but for the deeper tanks T5 HO's arn't even enough when you add CO2 as light becomes the limiting factor again, then they add MH and growth explodes again which shows that a MH will deliver more PAR at depth than T5's. the question remains though... how much punch do you need. Personally I do not think T5's are a long term solution for deep tank in any way other than color supplement. I have the T5's on my fresh water tank (22" deep) and my carpet plants are growing at about 1/2 the speed that they are in the pet shop on a 24" deep tank running MH.

Steve

What you do not know though is how old the bulbs were in comparison to eachother. Also the type/brand of ballast and reflectors play a huge role in PAR as well. Although your "general" comparison may be "somewhat" accurate.

Generally, I have found that the T5 Euro SPS tanks have a lower watt per gallon than the usual North American MH SPS tanks (on similarly dimensioned tanks). That is why I said that you generally need lower watts with T5s than you do with MH. Maybe "intensity" was a bad choice of words on my part...

I agree. I used the "watt per gallon" as a general comparison to similar SPS dominated tanks, and only in comparison of T5s to T5s or MH to MH. I am very aware that wpg is an inaccurate way of defining lighting intensity, BUT it is a good point to start from.

Ok...I see where we're not seeing eye to eye here. Thanks for taking the time to write out your explanation even though I am in the understanding of this. :)

I do know that T5s (and every other form of lighting) are limited to the depth they will light. Many other factors; like water clarity, reflectors, ballasts, etc also play a part. I have no interest in keeping SPS at the bottom of my tank. I chose to have a 24" tall and only 18" wide tank because of the look I would like to achieve.

Essentially, I would like to try to (simply) replicate a wild reef shelf (I think it would be called). With high light SPS on the top, lower light SPS lower, higher light LPS in the middle, lower light LPS lower down, and the lowest light corals down low. The way I will be building my rocks will make for a plateau type layout up high on the left, as well as a bench with sand in it for a clam. Under the plateau on the left side will be a low lit area for low light corals. The rocks then taper off on the right side of the tank creating a tiered effect.

So, in my case I do not need the light to have high intensity low down. I would like to be able to keep the lower light LPS corals near the bottom though. I will have a 3" sandbed as well.

What do you think of the T5 idea for this type of tank? I have decided that I want to go with the Sunlight Supply T5 Retro Fit kits instead of the Tek fixture. This way I can spread the lights out from front to back better. Good idea?

the lights I compared were brand new T5 HO against a brand new PC and a 7 month old MH with a ugly dirty reflector, so you can see the MH was at a disadvantage right off the start and probably would have been 3 to 4 times the out put of the others if it were new and clean, and I wasn't going to clean the stores equipment for them as they weren't paying me:mrgreen:

I was impressed with the T5 reflector as I think that is what caused it to be so high compared to the PC (I was expecting a 10 to 20% higher output not 40 to 50%. and I wasn't going to clean the stores equipment for them as they weren't paying me:mrgreen:

I started out my reef with exactly what you are thinking in a 24X24X36" tank. I started off with PC/VHO. then moved to 175 MH with them then to a new MH fixture, with several lighting changes in between. I think all together I spend 5 to 7K on just lighting because 6 years ago there was really no info on lighting so that is what I decided to play with and learn.

anyways I do understand what you are trying to do but let me ask you this.. what are you calling a "low light" coral. I had mushrooms, colt, leather, zoos, open brain, GSP, Montipora digitata, caps, milli's, acros, birdnest, and a few others in a 24" deep tank.

The PC/VHO kept everything alive, but thats it.. the 175 as a good addition but only in a limited area and still no nice colors in the SPS just brown and washed out blue. so after 2 months of reading and learning and measuring different setups with my PAR meter, I built my own reflectors for a twin VHO/Twin 250 MH SE on HQI ballasts
colors picked up right away, PAR was dramatically increased over the PC/VHO combination by about 15X.

what was I getting at here, Oh ya.. anyways under the MH set up the zoos, mushrooms, ect (all the so called low light corals) also exploded in growth and colors were intensified a little. so I am personally on the side of the "No such thing as to much light" side of the argument as I have never seen a coral suffer from increased lighting when it is increased properly.

I am not a big fan of sandbeds in the tank anymore, I started off with a 6" deep one myself, and while I loved the look after about 3 years it caused problems. I took 1/2 of it out and still had problems, took the rest out and problems went away. I think I would be tempted if I had to put something in there it would be a very thin layer of coarser sand siliconed to the bottom of the tank so it looks like there is a sand bed, but you could still have crazy water movement in the tank with out moving the sand around. If I decided I needed a DSB it would be split between 3 containers remotly and I would change one of the containers every 6 months, but having said that after I got rid of the sand I still always had zero nitrates so there was no need for a remote sand bed.

try the T5's if you are having problems then you can always change them to both actinic and add a MH pendant to it like you originaly stated.. this way you are not waisting any lights like I did.

Steve

What I call "low light" corals are the ones I don't want to grow like mad!!! LOL! Like GSP, my Bubble, and all the Euphyllia's. I do have really nice coloration on my Monti caps which are about 8" from my two 39W T5s. I figured if I added more T5s that I might be able to get the same coloring with the Monti's 12-14" away from the bulbs...?

I agree...never too much light (provided you can control the heat!!). I really like my GSP (it's an odd variety), but it already spreads like a mofo, I can just imagine what it would do under MH... EEK!

I have critters that need the sandbed. :D I won't be going BB in the foreseeable future. I strongly dislike the look of it. I run three MJ1200s on a
Red Sea "Wavemaker" in my 33 which makes for 27x turnover, and although it took me quite some time to cipher out how to position the PHs without blowing my oolite sugar sized sand around...it IS possible!!! LOL!!!! :D It would have been much easier with Koralia's or Tunze's.

I have a dual strip of 36" T5s that I plan on putting onto my 65. If I go MH I will use them for actinics, if I stick with T5s, then I'll use them as additional T5s.

You still haven't said exactly what you would suggest I light my tank with...? I understand you're all for the MH, but considering I refuse to put more than one MH over my tank, what type of ballast/wattage setup do you suggest? Personally, I'd like to use the PFO mini pendant. I'm thinkin a 250w HQI would likely be enough light, especially considering there is dyck all for bulb choice if I go for 400w HQI. My understanding is you get the highest PAR if you use an HQI bulb with an HQI ballast in comparison to HQI w/ electronic ballast or a mogul bulb w/HQI overdriving the bulb...?

Thanks for all your input Steve. :)

remember, more lights won't increase the intensity, only the spread so there still won't be anymore PAR at 12 to 14" than there is under the bulbs now, you wil just put a more even coverage of the same level by addinbg more bulbs.

ya, I had a 65X turnover with the 6" bedd, but when I upped it to 120X turn over it was insain on the sand bed so I had to keep it in the top 1/2 of the tank, when I got rid of the sand it let me even the flow out over the whole tank. and believe it or not high flow is one of the things that will prevent corals from bleaching from new lights, you just need tones of it.

Hmm, I have just been looking at lights myself so here is what I would do if you can only use 1. get a good mogal bulb enclosed reflector pendant. go with a giseman bulb say the 12.5K or "marine" I believe it is called (if AB's were easy to get I would go with there 10K but they are expensive and hard to get). and then run it with a newer style HQI electronic balllast or even better a digital ballast. (newer ones don't under drive the bulbs like the first ones 5 or so years ago did. A mogal based bulb will give you more coverage than a double ended will. actualy I believe there is some one on the board selling electronic ballast and mogal pendant for 75 bucks each but I am not sure what kind of ballasts they are. If you are using a hood you could use a retrofit reflector, but I mentioned the pendant style as it will be a little less heat.

Steve

Holy jebus!

I thought the PAR of an HQI bulb was considerably higher than a mogul?? Ya, I really like the look of the Giesemann Marine (13K actually :P ). I have never heard of an electronic HQI ballast...? I was going to go with this one:

http://www.jlaquatics.com/phpstore/s..._ID=pfo-bh401q

What about this pendant?

http://www.jlaquatics.com/phpstore/s...ct_ID=pfo-hp8m

Here's J&L Aquatics' 400w mogul based bulb selection (they only have one 400w HQI):

http://www.jlaquatics.com/phpstore/s...ategory_ID=197

Ok, here is my recomendation along the lines you are thinking.

from J&L
this ballast
http://www.jlaquatics.com/phpstore/s..._ID=pfo-be250e 177ish

the pendant you picked is fine, I personaly don't like the PFO stuff as it is bulky and there is way better out there for only a little more.

and 250W Megachrome Marine Mogul (13000K) Metal Halide Bulb - Mogul Base 93.ish (buy it from where ever.)
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personaly this would be my pick from sunlight supply
Galaxy™ 250 WattElectronic Ballast 120/240 Volt http://www.sunlightsupply.com/images/blank.gif902490http://www.sunlightsupply.com/images/blank.gifMetallic Green Anodized Aluminumhttp://www.sunlightsupply.com/images/blank.gif8.5lbs.http://www.sunlightsupply.com/images/blank.gif$157.95http://www.sunlightsupply.com/images/blank.gifEach

reflector pendant
http://www.sunlightsupply.com/produc...s%3D%26pgi%3D1

and the same bulb as above.

Steve

I have to get to bed, so I'll reply in the morning, but why are you suggesting I go with a 250w instead of a 400w?

400 is a waist of power, 250 mogals on HQI ballasts and good reflectors, put out more light than 400's, longer bulb life,

Steve