Made the switch to T5

[Stones]

Originally Posted by lastlight

I'm waiting for my 8x80w so this is all great information. There's next to nothing available on them. Heck until a few days ago I thought they were WHITE lol. Most do.

The variable hanging kit sounds awesome as does full glass shield. I hope the 60" fixture also has a full shield. I plan to mount a length of board to my ceiling first so I might not take advantage of the rail system.

How do you plan to access your tank with the fixture in the way. I wonder how others with similar setups do. I can't imagine adjusting the wire connector everyday is good for it. If it gets weak somehow and lets an end fall you'd be ruined. Also, swinging the fixture and tethering it to the back of the tank would be risky I imagine.

For mine I was thinking

ATI Blue Plus
ATI Aqua Blue
ATI Blue Plus
ATI Pro Color
GE Daylight 6500K
ATI Blue Plus
ATI Aqua Blue
ATI Blue Plus

Still up in the air. I've never had a T5 before.

Actually, I have the Sfiligoi fixture hanging ~5" from the waters surface. I took those photos right after I got the fixture cable hanging system installed.

I would actually have the fixture even lower but I have a RENA autofeeder on the back of my tank that is ~4.5" tall so my light has to be higher than this.



With the fixture as high as it was in the photos I originally posted, I was getting an incredible amount of light spillage into the room. My tank is only 18" wide and the fixture I believe is 19.25" wide.

With regards to the other question about raising and lowering the fixture, the cable system that came the fixture works pretty great.



In the image, the area highlighted in red is threaded and tightens to lock the cable in place. When you loosen this piece, it turns into a button that when depressed, allows you to raise or lower the fixture. I did notice that when you tighten this piece and lock the fixture in place, it does leave a slight kink in the cable holding the fixture up. However, I do not forsee this becoming a problem as the kinks are so small they are unnoticable from a distance and the locking mechanism still slides easily over these areas.

Even with my fixture 5" above my tank, I can still reach in and perform minor maintenance tasks without raising the fixture. Reaching to hard to get areas and re arranging live rock would require me to raise the fixture though.

With regards to the 60" fixture, they do come with a full glass shield however it is a 3 piece instead of a 2 piece. The instruction manual for my fixture is generic so it shows all 48", 60" and 72" models in both T5 and metal halide + T5s.

That bulb combo you have selected looks great and was what I was originally planning on going with. However, ATI bulbs are not so easy to come by any more unless you order them from reef geek. I would probably suggest swapping out the GE 6500K bulb for another ATI aquablue special as these are 12K bulbs and look incredibly white. Even the 15K Aquascience bulb I have in my fixture stands out and I would have rather went with another Kz New Gen coral light if I could have found one. I would also recommend the Kz Fiji purple over the pro colour as I've done a fair amount of reading on T5's and most people who were using pro colours switched to the Fiji purple as it is a higher PAR bulb but still brings out the vibrant reds, pinks, and to some degree, purples that blue bulbs can not.