LIghting : Min VS. MAx

[ca2pa]

About three weeks ago I have set up a 40g salt water tank with the intent to only put in fish. Since this was my initial impression, I chose to use the hyposalinity method, recommended by my LFS--the owner --has had a lot of succes with keeping parasite from popping up.
My question is concerning lighting & LR and HYPO being compatable...currently I have only floresent lighting (2) 24" plant bulbs left over from a tropical fresh water tank...advise was given to my if I wanted to but LR or any invertabrates into my tank I would need to get my lighting to aprx 200 watts (50/50 & actinac).
I wish only to put live rock (maybe 20lbs or so...) and if that does well--an anemone of some sort...(at Hypo this may not be possible)--Is this correct?
Would it be possible to light the tank w/(1)20w 50/50 bulb and (1)actinac and have a small amount of LR?
Currently, there are two damsels and one percula clown doing well. w/ 35 lbs of aragonite...I have not done any water testing for nitrites since the tank is only begining to cycle...
Any help would be great!
Thanks-
Sho

 

[aarone]

that clown may not live through the cycle. I keep my tank at about 1.21 and i bought an anenome from The LFS in a salinity of about 1.08 so it took awhile to acclimate. I am not experienced in hypo salinity, so i do not know what a true hypo level is. as for LR lighting, you dont really need much, i run 60 watts and i have about 30 pounds of lr and it has many live critters on it. hth

 

[tygerfifteen]

I got a 68 gallon with 90 watts and red,green and purple coraline algae are slowly growing.(planning to upgrade though)

 

[eeldarb21]

I have a 55 gallon tank just set up about 2 weeks ago...(cycling) damsels and lr already in there... problem was i had old flourecent lights for a freshwater tank.. i just bought as of today, a 36" fixture with pc 50/50 and antic lights in it... i bought this from hellolights.com i would recomend these people to buy from.. nice guys there! called me to confirm and will get them in a day or so.. cost reasonable compared to lfs..

 

[ca2pa]

It would be interesting to see, how the up grades in the lighting that "eeldarb21" would result in...it would be the closest to what I could reasonably do...
ONe bit of info I rxd from the largest LFS in the area was regarding the lighting they used for their live rock ( FUji & Tongan) was only about 1w/gal--but he said I would have to raise my salinity from 1.010 (HYPO) to the norm of about 1.02 or so... this was for the live rock...
IF I wanted to go with some inverts--then the formula was about a min.of 3w/gal...FYI