Re: Lighting and Lux

["Wayne Jones" <waj at mnsi_net>]

Bill wrote:


So, Wright, I'll design the spreadsheet form and e-mail it to you, and
you
can coordinate the gathering of the data.  Then as a group here we can
estimate the lux requirements of various plants and revolutionize the
hobby!

How about that?


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Much of this work has already been done. There is Ivo's site article and
an excellent article by Iwasaki. As I said before all that is really
required is come up with a better aquarium fixture efficiency especially
when it comes to lamp spacing or lamp fill in a fixture. Lumen
correction factors for converting lumens to PAR are available, lamp
lumens are available, ballast factors are usually available. I think
that dividing the results by gallons is good enough for our purposes.
Even working with what is available I have no trouble predicting what
sort of plants you can grow with what sort of light fixture. The
attenuation of light in an aquarium with depth does not appear to be a
linear function but it is close enough for our purposes. This factor
will vary wildly just depending on what sort of shape your plants are
are how well trimmed you trim your tank.

Wayne