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Originally Posted by Canadian
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see Andrew, he is using a 16 to 18" deep tank, but thats not the issue. when you say comparing against a 250watt Mh that real means nothing, I read the thread and discovered that he was comparing 14" Phoenix bulbs (and DE's to boot which are lower output than SE's), which are one of the lowest out put bulbs on many tests and on an electronic ballast which under drives the bulb (only know that because I saw a thread on the aquamedic ballasts and what to replace them with)
when I was running my SE AB 10K's on the bottom of a 24" deep tank with the lights 6" above the water I was getting values of 640. he is getting that in about 8" of water and 7" of air. so same readings at 3X the water depth which is the important thing as air made very little difference from 6" to 15" (I was board when my tank was empty once, I also discovered that 1/4" glass only gets rid of 1.823% of the PAR passing through it
this is one of the things I hate about the comparisons, people through them out there testing the top of the line against bottom of the line but neglect to tell you that, If you remember years ago when I first started doing measurements I was threatened by IceCap and they had Reef Central delete all my posts as I proved they were under driving VHO bulbs by using HO electronic ballasts and asked them about it in a public forum.
well i am not saying anything bad about T5's I like them and they are what they say they are. And yes you can grow corals under them, as you can with PC's VHO, and even NO's if you are real shallow, but what I will say is they are not as intense as a MH and do not have the same degree of penetrating power as a MH. I do use T5's on my fresh water tank, and while it is a respectable output compared to a lot it is not quite as good as the TeK I have found.. I was actually surprised though as it uses a parabolic type reflector which has two bulbs in it and it is almost as good as the Tek, but not quite.
Steve
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