T5 Par & Bulb Selection

[fkshiu]

Anyhooooo,

back when I had my 4x39W Teklight my bulb arrangement was this:

FRONT
G-man actinic
Coralvue 10K
Coralvue 10K
G-man actinic+
BACK

The Coralvues are kinda crappy and yellow but I guess the got the job done and they're cheaper. G-man's are good bulbs and I think offset the yellow of the coralvues very well.

That Grimreefer's thread that you linked previously contains a wealth of information if you have the patience to sift through it.

I'm now using 3x175w MH w/PC actinics over my 6-footer. I plan on switching to an "overkill" setup using 250w HQI (XM 10K) with 2x80W T5HO (G-man actinic+) and 2x160W VHO (UVL super actinics) in the very near future. I hope to get the best of all worlds with this setup: the PAR and penetration of the 10K MH bulb, the blue spectrum of the T5 and the actinic pop of the VHO.

For the record, the had the T5 bulbs in the teklight for almost 18 months without changing them and I did not notice any noticeable degradation in light output/colour over that time and the corals (LPS/softies) did not seem to "sag" at any point.

[sphelps]

I've been running T5s for a while now on a few different setups. The best bulbs available to us in Canada are the ATI line up, they produce the highest par ratings that I have seen compared to other bulbs.

The most common bulbs used are the;
Aquablue special (around 14000K), if you like whiter tanks this bulb alone will produce the color you like.
Blue + (around 22000K), basically just a bright blue bulb, you can add a few of these to create a more blue tank, I believe a 50/50 mix of the blue+ and aquablue will create similar color as a 20K halide.

Also new from ATI are 2 new bulbs;
A Pure Actinic which has a pink/purple glow and acts much like a black light making corals glow, however I've found similar pure actinic bulbs to be drowned out by the much brighter other bulbs.
A new daylight, similar to the aquablue special but is said to have a 5% red spectrum just like the KZ coral light bulb. The extra red gives some more color pop from opposite colors like blue, purple and green.

HTH