Replace fluorescent tubes every six months

["Richard J. Sexton" <richard at aquaria_net>]

>You can use them. They will work. But if you chnage them every six months
>your plants will be much much happier.
>- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>This is not true for many lamps. Lumen maintenance is normally very good.
>The ones to watch out for are wide spectrum plant lamps that are designed to
>match the photopic response of plants. They do indeed fade fast but as I
>said before they never come with any specs, so you can't estimate the lumen
>maintenance. I just measured my 6 year old SPX 50s against new lamps and
>they have not depreciated more than 20%. It is not fair to compare a brand
>new lamp with an old lamp as lamps experience a great deal of lumen loss in
>the first 100 hours. Here is a lumen maintenance curve for a 55 watt lamp:
>http://dafnwebpd.mysylvania.com/IDMWEB/doccontent.asp?docid=003676276
>This curve is nothing special. There are lamps that are much better than
>this and lamps that are much worse. Here's another graph that is so crappy
>you can barely read it:
>http://dafnwebpd.mysylvania.com/IDMWEB/doccontent.asp?docid=003676784 It is
>comparing 800, 700 and halophosphor lamps. Even the halophosphor lamps do
>not fall below 80% lumen maintenance.

Fair enough, I don't think I've ever used triphosphor tubes. But
as you say not all tubes decay at the same rate.

I can't see the graphs you posted URLS of, it says:

Not logged on or session timed out ... please logon.

But gives you no way to login. Grr.

GE has the best graphs of this kind of stuff. Wish I could find them.

While I say "6 months" I'm much lazier than that and for me it's 8-12
months, but I do notice a profound increase in plant growth when I
stick in new tunes. I use either wide spectrum gor lux or Chromo50
depending on my mood.



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