Re: Bulb Question

To: Aquatic-Plants at actwin_com
Subject: Re: Bulb Question
From: "Hoa G. Nguyen" <nguyenh at nosc_mil>
Date: Sat, 01 Jun 1996 12:13:27 -0700

>
>From: "David W. Webb" <dwebb at ti_com>
>
>IMO, 50/50 and other actinic bulbs are much better for a reef tank than they
>are for a plant tank.  If you want a high-intensity blue bulb, I'd recommend
>the Penn Plax Ultra Trilux.  I have one of these, and it's a very bright
>whitish blue.  

I believe the Ultra Trilux is about 6200K.

>After having spent mega-bucks on the tri-phosphor aquarium bulbs (Triton and
>Penn Plax Ultra Trilux), I've discovered commercial lighting vendors (kudos >to
>people on this list for pointing them out to me).  Grainger is one, but they
>only sell to companies.  You can look in the yellow pages under lighting and
>should be able to find a lighting place that will sell you the 5000K blue
>tubes

5000K tubes look kind of yellow to me, 6500K looks blue.  But it's all relative.

>I've found that too much red or yellow in the spectrum tends to encourage red
>algae growth, so I definitely try to lean towards the blue, but I really like
>the additional yellows that you get with an added 2700K tube.
>

I've never tried 2700K tubes.  But I like a combination of 6500K and 5000K
tubes.  I'm currently using a combination of 2/3 6200K (Ultra Trilux) and
1/3 5000K (Ultralume), and it looks great and the plants love it.  These are
all T10 bulbs.  BTW, I guess when we're talking ratios, we should take into
account the lumens of the individual tubes, not just the number of tubes.

Hoa