can i run a murcury vapor with MH175w m57

[naso140]

i read in another thread that sometimes you can and sometimes you cant. if anyone can tell me why or why not that would be terrific. im wanting to run this for just a little while till i get the other MH lamp. i obviously have 2 ballasts that are for a 175w MH , it does say hid and its m57. any help would be great. come to think of it it says on the ballast "or mercury vapor". so i guess my question is can you run one of each at the same time and why/why not

 

[rtspeed]

i would say you can, the reason some can not is the igniator is not strong enough to lite a mercury vapor or sodium vapor, which is under greater pressures.

 

[geoj]

I would look into UV light filtering some have it some don’t

 

[naso140]

wow thanks for the fast replys guys. i am about to go fire them at the same time in about 10 minutes. i also had a 36'' actinic, but made myself some good moonlight with a blue light-rope. acually in all its 30 feet total of that stuff. looks good so im gonna have a 36 in daylight bulb now to accent the one MH and one MV. kind of a weird compalation of lighting, but i hope it works. i couldnt help but notice that after i cleaned my seaclone skimmer it just started going to town with foam. ive had the best luck with that thing. so- i'll be back in 3o minutes with a report and comments and thoughts on my wacked out lighting-by-commitee are welcome and appreciated

 

[naso140]

so apperantly i replaced one MV for a new one and its repeating what it did earlier with the new MH and old MV which is the MV warms up nice and slow but the MH is sloooowww to fire up. is this ok? basically i just dont want to cause a fire

 

[rtspeed]

Most MH I have seen takes a good 10 minutes to warm up. MV will warm up quicker just due to the nature of the bulb.

 

[naso140]

thanks speed it did fire ,just took 10 minutes. the MV looks horrible. its making me wonder if the old bulbs were mv or not. they certainly are not that yellow. i put the old one back and will just get the other MH asap. also, my daylight 36''(barely noticable) bulb was not a coralife and the actinic is , so back in went the actinic. also my lights are on timers for the first time since ive had the tank(1 yr) the moonlights come on at 7pm (45 min before hallides and 36 actinic go off at 8:15pm) and run untill 12 pm (the actinic and hallides come on at 11:30 am.) . does that sound correct for targeting evening viewing? if not , please let me know your suggestions. one more thing- lets just say the old bulbs were both 175w MV lights running on twin ballast and the electric bill is just fine. will the swap to true 175w MH bulbs cause an increase on the bill? just wondering what to expect. thanks again to all the speedy replies, B

 

[stdreb27]

I'm pretty sure you can't get MV bulbs that range up in the k ratings that we'd want for our tanks. But I'm not sure.

 

[naso140]

thanks stdreb27. it was not good looking at all. the other thing is i havent made the plung yet to the MHs made specifically for SW tanks. i got these at home depot and they are MH but im sure they dont have the spectrum as the $90 bulbs. thats why im kinda leaning towards buying a coralife 36" bulb to enhance the "wannabe" MH

 

[rotarymagic]

I think you ended up making yourself spend more money than you thought you'd save.. sorry.
Good news is, there's plenty of used lights for sale for cheap in the classifieds to "fix" the problem.

 

[mr_x]

the home depot lamps are about 2500-3000k. they are just about right for algae, not corals. your corals aren't getting much of anything from them i'm afraid. i purchased my mh lamps for somewhere around 50-60 bucks shipped. what bulbs are you looking at for 90 dollars?