• Folks, if you've recently upgraded or renewed your annual club membership but it's still not active, please reach out to the BOD or a moderator. The PayPal system has a slight bug which it doesn't allow it to activate the account on it's own.

Thinking about changing my lighting, questions.

M

mnat

Officer Emeritus
Staff member
Moderator
I currently have the oceanic 30g cube, dimensions 20x18x21, and have a geismann 250w MH pendant over it. I bought the whole thing as a package so i did not think to much about the lighting at the time. I have had the tank for almost one year and I am not totally in love with the lighting. I have to keep a lot of corals down on the sand so they are not getting too much light which kind of wastes all the nice live rock. I have to be very very careful with even the most light loving corals. The ironic thing is that my best growers in the tank are zoas.

So my question is would it make sense to downgrade from a 250w pendant to a 150w pendant? Does anyone see a huge issue with this? We have sps, lps, zoas, and an anem in the tank right now. I love t5s but there is not a really good fixture that would fit the tank and we really dont have the room where the tank is setup right now to put on a 24 inch fixture. The second part of that is we would need a six or eight bulb 24 inch T5 which are not made by everyone and are expensive (ATI). LED are out of the question, way to expensive and we don't really trust the technology yet. One last point, someone made the comment that if I went up to a 20k bulb (currently 14k) it would not be as intense and would help. Is this true?
 
mikem

mikem

Officer Emeritus
Officer Emeritus
Yes. It would make sense to downgrade to a 150 of 175 watt pendant.
Or.Yes you can reduce your par with a higher K bulb.
 
Nickjr000

Nickjr000

If you up your par you'll sacrifice some growth. Can you raise the light higher? How far is it off the water now? I have plenty of acros and a big anemone about 10" from my 250 10k and their fine. I know people who have stuff about 10-12 inches away from 400w mh and its fine. What are you trying to keep under them that you said is light loving?
 
M

mnat

Officer Emeritus
Staff member
Moderator
The light is about 8 inches above the tank, we have acros and monties.
 
magic

magic

Officer Emeritus
Officer Emeritus
Mike

The 150s would give you enough penetration and save you money at the same time. I have 150s on my tank which is 18 deep and I can support sps on the lower lr.

Bob
 
NikkiT

NikkiT

Thanks Bob, thats helpful. Its amazing how much more difficult it seems to be to grow corals in that tank than in the 20G.
 
D

ds4x4

I happened to just read an article about Montipora/stony corals in the Butterfly issue of CORAL 5 mins ago and they suggested 150 for your size as 250 would be too much. 24Deep is perfect for 250's IMO.

CORAL Nov/Dec 09 page 58 said:
As a rule of thumb, one should reckon on one 250-watt HQI lamp for an area31 inches (80cm) square and a water column 24 inches (60cm) deep. If the aquarium is shallow, you can use 150-watt lamps; if it's deeper increase the wattage of the lamps accordingly. If you use T5 tubes, an aquarium measuring 48L x 20Wx 20H inches (120L x 50w x 50hcm) should be illuminated by at least four 54-watt tubes.
Click to expand...
 
M

mnat

Officer Emeritus
Staff member
Moderator
Hawkeye said:
why not just move everything into the illuminata then you don't have to worry about the 30g... ;)
Click to expand...

Soon enough, and we already have the T5 fixture for that. The problem is we have a flameback angel in the 20g and a flame angel in the 30g. From what we have researched they will not do well together, so we will have to keep at least one other tank up and running in the meantime. I got a lead on a 175 MH fixture that I will be checking out this weekend.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top