I'm new at this, but I just installed my new MH lights, and I LOVE THEM. I looked at all the pricing options, from PC to VHO, to MH, to every combo I could think of between them all. I found you got more watts per dollar when most of your lighting comes from MH, then supplement with NO lights in whatever spectrum you want to add to your reef. I went with 2x250 watt 12000K MH supplemented with 2 NO 50/50 lights inside a hood I built, using the PFO parallel reflector, and PFO ballast and end caps I found on ---- for under $200. The NO lighting I cannibalized from my old light bars. This gives me 580 Watts with over 90% of it PAL (photo synthetic available). The other 10% is just to wash out the blue tones so it doesn’t look like a "deep water" reef, and it lets me see all the collars of all my corals. After purchasing the bulbs, and a 4" variable speed fan, I did it for under $400, which works out to about $.69 (SIXTY NINE DUDE!) per watt. That was the lowest I could get no matter what other combinations I tried. So...my advise it to try to do it with MH and Normal Output. You can always add VHO to your hood later if you still want them.
