Bang Guy's Latest Experiment

[bang guy]

Every month or so someone will ask about Black Light lamps. They are immediately told they won't work and that the UV will kill corals & everything else in the tank. I've never commented on these threads because I really don't know.
I have looked and looked, queried, gone to the library, etc. (yes, I'm a hick but I learnt to read in my third year of 8th grade)
Well, I'm pretty sure it's not a good idea for reef tanks. They are probably either useless or detrimental. I have decided to find out which.
I'm setting up a 10 gallon nano and any suggestions will be welcome (as will any donated sacrificial corals).
This is the plan so far;
Equipment:
10 gallon cheapo-tank
Magnum 350 canister filter
1/2" sand bed of very live sand
3 X 20 watt Phillips Black-Light flourescent bulbs
IceCap 660 to overdrive the bulbs (should be around 10 WPG of Black Light)
Eggcrate rack to hold corals close to the bulbs
Livestock:
Xenia
Orange Mushroom
Green Mushroom
Green Hairy Mushroom
Protopalythoa Polyps
Candy Cane Coral
Orange Ricordea Yuma
Yellow Figi Leather
Orange Montipora digitata
2 juvenile Ocellaris Clownfish

 

[bigarn]

Go for it Dr. Bangenstein. lol

How long before we get updates?

 

[russianspy]

Were not talking moonlights are we?

 

[lovethesea]

all I can say is thank you for always trying to help us all learn new things :yes:

 

[bang guy]

Originally posted by RussianSpy
Were not talking moonlights are we?
Not with my understanding of a moonlight. I don't have one but I thought they were a couple of blue LEDs or something similar.
These are the NO flourescent Black lights.
I'll start building today and try to get pictures.
I would like suggestions though to make the test accurate.
I decided to overdrive the bulbs to accelerate any negative effects. Anyone disagree with that idea? Overdriving cannot change the spectrum, it just doubles the number of photons produced.

 

[reefnut]

What classification of UV does black lights produce??
edit: just found out they produce UVA light. My guess is it will be more useless than harmful...

 

[bang guy]

Here's the Lamp Holder I made. I borrowed the design from one of the members here although I can't remember who she is.
Top:

 

[bang guy]

Bottom:

 

[montidanae]

looks pretty cool bang! but woulnt alot of people run them on regualr NO ballasts? not ususaly on an icecap, IMO, looks forward to results....

 

[bang guy]

Originally posted by Bang Guy
I decided to overdrive the bulbs to accelerate any negative effects.
I don't know about the typical reef keeper. I know that any NO bulb I ran would be overdriven. It's a really cheap way to get twice the light.

 

[bang guy]

Here's the setup. The tank is very used but I'll clean it up soon.

 

[bang guy]

here's what it looks like with the work lights off and no flash.
From left to right:
Xenia, Candy Cane, Protopalythoa (above the Candy Cane), Orange Mushroom, Green Mushroom, Yellow Figi Leather, Tulip Anemone.
The red glow on the egg crate is Coralline.
The water looks really cloudy, I'll have to figure out what that's all about.

 

[montidanae]

saltwater looks very cloudy under the black lgiths, another good idea would be to use 2 10ks and 2 blakc lgiths for supliment.

 

[bang guy]

Here's the pic:

 

[schneidts]

I disagree. I think that would create inaccurate results.
Bang-
So, corals fade=black light bad. Corals survive=black light good?
Just wondering how you plan to measure your data.

 

[bang guy]

Excellent question and the primary reason I asked for opinions.
The plan was to keep a variety of corals and see who grows and who dies.
If everything dies then it's detrimental.
If Mushrooms live then it's not totally useless as a light source. The usefulness can be guessed depending on which corals die. If Montipora grow then the light is not detrimental and possibly useful.
What do you think??

 

[dskidmore]

If the point is to see if black light is detrimental, useless or positive, what is your control? A tank with no light?
I'm way to scientifically minded. After a reasonable ammount of time, I would repeate the experiment with mixed blacklight and normal specrum lighting, then again with just normal (although you may already have data on that), and again with no light at all.
If everyting goes downhill fast, you don't know at this point if the corals are suffering from a lack of normal light or an excess of blacklight.

 

[schneidts]

I think it's a worthy experiment. I guess this could be a preliminary test, of sorts. If things die fairly quickly (which I don't think they will), then it might not be worth persueing. If they do "o.k." then you could probably get very specific. What kind of light source are they coming from?

 

[schneidts]

I was assuming the control was your own display, and that the specimens came from your display.

 

[bang guy]

Yes the animals were growing just fine under VHO.
I agree that a good part two would be 10K VHO lighting supplemented by Black Light instead of Actinic. Thank you for the suggestion!! I don't have the resources to set up three versions of this so I'll have to do any controls sequentially instead of parallel.
The water will constantly be replaced with water from my Lagoon so that's not going to be a variable.