Why MH instead of overdriving NO or PC's?
 

I am researching into getting MH for my future reef tank and I recalled the article in one of the aquarium magazines about overdriving NO bulbs with icecap ballasts. Then I recalled somebody started using the workhorse series ballasts to overdrive PCs and NO bulbs. I did a search on the subject and came upon an article by ReefBurnaby (although he did not use a workhorse in this article) http://reefcentral.com/forums/showth...threadid=48133

In the article, he overdrived two F32T8 fluroescent tubes with 80W each and and he wrote the following:
"My lighting measurements are the following :
At the surface, 16000 to 20000 lux.
At middle of tank, 7000 lux.
At bottom of the tank. 4500 lux.

BTW, usually 2x175W MH produce this much light It is also...encroaching the 2x250W area."

This article was written almost two years ago now and judging by the search results and responses, it sounded like a lot of people were very excited and were going to or already doing it.

Now my questions are:
1) Those who did OVRNO, how do you rate them now?
2) How well did it work growing LPS? SPS?
3) Is the light distribution from 4ft tubes better than having 2xMH bulbs?

Basically I would like to know if OVRNO is as good as having 175W MH or 250W MH?

PS - I didn't post this in the newbie section because I want to get the opinions of the more experienced reefers.

I did a fairly extensive set of testing with overdriven lights using WH7's as I overdrove lighting my self. I can say that an overdriven NO has nowhere near the intensity of a 175 watt MH, for that matter an overdriven NO isn't even half the intensity of a PC of the same length. If you do a search on overdriving on this board you will find my old tests.

I still overdrive NO actinics to VHO levels but the VHO still has a higher PAR output than the NO running at VHO power levels (mopre than twice the PAR value)

Two MH on the tank will make it a lot brighter than overdriven NO bulbs but it will also give you more contrast between the shadows and the light (looks kinda neat to me) a flourescent will give your tank a flat lighting look with less definition between the light and dark.

I used to have 4 overdriven NO's on my tank and one 175 watt MH, when the MH came on it outpowered the NO's so bad you couldn't even tell they were on except for the lighter shadowed areas.

I went to the MH because the SPS didn't grow or color up under the overdriven lights and with the 175 they were alright but I really noticed a difference with the 250 watt bulbs on a hqi ballast.


Steve