Hi Ari,
It's good of you to share your experience.
I have run two warm daylight[wrong colour temp] pl phillips 36W lights in a small tank[36G] and the plants did very well to my surprise. pearling in most of the plants... Queen of Siam, Blyxa Japonica, Blyxa Aubertii, Mini riccia, Shimadai. The only thing is later i tried to grow glosso but the glosso grew tall as the tank was 2 ft high and i couldn't fit in more lights at the top because of space limitations. Perhaps a stronger special output light would have kept the glosso growing low.
That's why minimum threshold is not enough when the lamps start to fade. Choice of plants are also important in decision making. The idea of shade plants or bright light plants.
From experience glosso is really the most light needy plant i've come across because of the low level of planting.
FIY it took me two to three years to figure out i didn't have enough lighting for glosso in two ft high tanks. I started out using azoo tubes then sera, arcadia, powerglo, hitachi and last year some ADA and then phillips and osram. so far i think not much difference except for colour rendition once you exceed the plants needs in terms of lighting.
Aroholic, the shop light 150W MH can grow plants but you need to mix it with some colour correcting fl tubes to get the desired colour as there is a bit of blue that makes red plants look dull in appearance. They are very 'spotlight' in terms of the intensity and would be better depending on the dimensions of your tank if you got the 70W ones and spread them. eg. 4 ft wide tank use 2X70W mh + one fl daylight/pink tube.
regards
stan
Last edited by standoyo : 11-05-2006 at 06:26 AM.
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