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Re: Review: Wonder Lights
Erik Olson wrote:
>
> On Mon, 31 May 1999, Moishe Wasserman wrote:
>
> > A month ago I bought Wonder Lites. Wonder Lites are mercury vapor bulbs
> > thats screw into a regular socket. (More info at thekrib).
> >
> > My tank:
> >
> > 35 gallon
> ...
>
> > Previous to my use of the new wonder lights I had three 90 watt halogen
> > floodlamps and tw0 30 watt blue and red fluorescents.
>
> Let's use the liberal estimate that halogen's are 1/3 as efficient as
> fluorescent or gas discharge lighting. That's (90*3)/3 + 60 = 150 watts.
> Pretty much right on the high end of the 2-4 watts/gallon guideline.
I never thought that there could be a 'maximum' of light. I am sure in
nature that light can exceed even what I have yet plants grow great.
Take Africa for instance...
> > In the weeks
> > following the placement of these three 160W lamps, the plants seem to die
> > out. New growth was rare and stunted and the water turned cloudy.. The
> > wisterialiterally crumbled, the bacopa turned black and stopped growing, the
> > ludwigia turned very blackish and died, and the cardamine died. The
> > ech.cordifoulous just turned brown.
>
> Holy crap! 160x3 = 480 watts over a 35 gallon tank? No wonder they died.
> Way too much.
Yet for some reason, the aquarium is brighter with the floodlights. It
even penetrates more.
> > Ahem, I dished out a respectable amount for these mercury lamps, can someone
> > please explain to me what I did wrong? Or does this prove that halogen is
> > better than fluorescent? In all my attempts to grow plants, I have always
> > succeeded with halogen, yet have had limited results with fluorescent.
>
> Well, first of all, Mercury vapor is not fluorescent. Second, the reason
> many of us tend not to recommend halogen or other incandescent lighting is
> not because your plants won't grow, but rather because you have to use 3-4
> times as much power to get the equivalent light (and risk baking your
> tank, not having a 5000K color balance, etc). In fact, some have
> suggested on this list people might have good luck using incandescent
> bulbs to flower Echinodorus species (because of the infrared emissions?
> check the archives).
True it is not, but it is similar. It doesent work the same way, but
the output is similar. I had very good luck with halogen before I
switched. I just thought I would have even better results with
Wonderlites. In fact, I had terrible luck with echinodorous, but that's
for a different time...
> Whenever you change the lighting level drastically on a tank, things are
> going to get thrown out of balance, and there's a recoil time. However,
Not quite. Immediately after switching back to halogen, the plants
sprouted and bubbled the next day.
> tripling the light over a system already near maximum is just not good.
> Perhaps there's something you're not telling us about how the lights are
> set up ("Oh yeah, the tank's in a greenhouse and the 3 160 watt lamps are
> 5 feet above and light the entire greenhouse too"), but if those three
> lights are going right into a 35 gallon tank, you've got too much. Try
Nothing weird. The three lights were some 5-10" above the tank.
> switching to a single 160 watt bulb, and use the other two when you buy
> that 90 later. :)
I did try. The tank was dark on the sides and the plants didn't seem to
change. This is a total mystery to me. I have no clue. I followed all
the rules tried everything. The light color seems ok, why do the plants
perfer a much cheaper halogen bulb?
-Moishe
> - Erik
>
> --
> Erik Olson
> erik at thekrib dot com
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