Quote:
Originally posted by Seaquest:
the iwasaki bulb is nothing more than an industrial warehouse bulb that was developed over seas, it just happened to have a 6500K rateing and was not designed for aquarium use, but was slowly intraduced because of its original cheap cost.
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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">the Iwasaki was actualy developed as a conversion bulbs for plant and flower growers.
when growing flowers people were using Mercury Vapour lamps which are very low K (3000K avrage)
which stimulates fast and lush growth but not flowering. now normaly you would then get higher K MH lights and put them up to induce flowering but that was very costly.
By using the MH conversion bulb you didn't have to buy new ballast which made the process alot cheeper.
The iwasaki's do put out more par watt for watt than any other mogual style MH bulb the only ones that seam to beat them are the HQI bulbs. any this has been showen in various test
as showen in the marine fish 2002 annual, the PPFD (photosynthetic Photo Flux Density of the 250 watt iwasaki "r" @ a distance of 18" was 130, the non "R" was 124. In the 400 watt 10000K and 12000K bulbs the results were: ALS sunburst 66.84, Osram 90.6, and Blueline 71.60.
now the bulb that did beat the iwasaki was a 150 watt double ended HQI it was a acualine 10000K with a reflector and it came out to 246. sence this was using a reflector you could probably add 50 to 75% to the iwasaki's results to get a better comparason as the Iwasaki test was with out a reflector.
so as you can see the Iwasaki is a bulb that was created to promote photosynithisis (*sp*) and not to light a wharehouse.
I don't know if this is just useless information or not, but I hope it isn't.
Steve