Thursday, December 31, 2009

Aquarium Lighting - FLOURO's "lighting for thought"

I have been running the planted tank for a while now and, I have been unhappy with the plant growth - I double checked my flouro's and, they were tri-phosphor t8's. On previous planted tanks I have used say a 3 foot flouro with predominantly a blue spectrum + a 3 foot bulb with a predominantly red spectrum. So Basically never used tri-phosphor t8's by Phillips or NEC before however, was told they were good for aquariums.
Now after doing a fair bit of research I have discovered that these particular tri-phosphors are very high in the green spectrum of light therefore, appearing brighter to the human eye. For fish only aquariums this wouldn't pose a problem however, for planted tanks such as mine this is not beneficial as the plants absorb predominantly the red spectrum for growth.

Basically the best type of bulb for planted aquariums which I might add aren't hugely popular from what I can tell in Australia (or sydney at least) are the flouro's which are high in the red spectum of light + blue also .... but, red being more important.

Both bulbs are 30 watt - therefore giving my tank a total of 60 watts of lighting to 120 litres of water = 2 watts per liter which should be very sufficient for a planted tank.

Go check out the following links for some more information on lighting:

http://watershed3.tripod.com/lighting.html
http://aquaticconcepts.thekrib.com/Articles/AFM_Lighting.htm

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