Lighting Question
Tigger, the $5.00 NO T8 bulbs are fairly yellow.. for a good colour that will make your stuff look pretty you are going to pay 20.00 and up / bulb. I use normal daylight bulbs on my fresh water planted tanks but only because there is so much green inside the tank you can't tell the difference between different colour temps. having said that.. that is all personal tast.. if you like the colour then go for it.. but now with NO bulbs you will not get the punch that a PC has, I get 160 PAR from two 96 watt PC's at a depth of 12", on my fresh water tank I am running 4 T8's and I don't even get 1/2 of that.
if you were to go to 8 bulbs you would be putting more light over the tank but not increasing the intensity (does that make sence to you?) another way to put it would be your amount of light would be more evenly spread but you would not have "more" light at one particular spot. it is hard to explain but lets say you had 4 bulbs on a 24 inch wide tank. lets say each bulb puts out 2000 lumen (normal for a real good T8) so all togeather if you add up your bulbs you have 8000lumen, but directly under any bulb you only have 2000. now as you penatrate into the water lets say that you are only running one bulbs and 12" below it you get a reading of 300 lumen, as you move to the side it drops off more as you get farther away from the center of the bulb, now you add more bulbs.. what yyou have done is spread the light not intensafied it.. now at 12" you still have the same 300 lumen but as you move sideways away from the bulb it stays at 300 lumen because you are geting light spread across the tank now instead of just on one side.
now that I have totaly messed you up does that help? it is much easyer to explain this in person that on the computer but I hope you can grasp what my rambling was intending to say :D
from a money point of view.. two workhorse 7's 120.00 and 8 T8 bulbs 30 to 40is.. and you have a yellowish tank with no actinics.. if you buy a mix of actinic and ultra daylight T'8's now you are at 160.00 for bulbs. 2 96 watt PC's and one workhourse ~200.00 I would go with the PC's and the workhorse 7 myself..
Steve
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