What Lighting?

[StirCrazy]

Originally Posted by Myka

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

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

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