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75bownut
Guest
ok I am going to buy a metal halide set up for my tank, its a 72 gallon bow and has been up and running for just over a year, here is a pic of it, currently I have 4x65 watt pc lights, I was wondering If you were doing this up grade how many watts would you go with???? mogul or hqi???? pc secondary lights or T-5 ??? I want to be able to keep whatever kind of coral etc...., I know that I like the blueier lighting like the 14,000k or 20,000k , would you get some kind of combo etc . is hqi better or not ??? :help:
opm and second off at 5:00pm. Peak sunlight at the equator just below water is 7000 lumens! With this setup you can keep anything you want, just put high light loving animals in the top 12" and up and lower light below that. Certainly 250w MH would work, but in my opinion theres no need to spend the extra money. Don't forget you have to pay the electric bill too. To go to 250s would cost another $95.00/yr in electricity cost not to mention the fixtures and heat. You can go with 150w HQIs too. They give the same lumens as the 175w MH. High light animals require 7000-8000 lumens, medium 4000-5000, low 1500-2500 lumens. As you can see I've done some research before I purchased lights. By the way I built my own canopy and installed retros myself. IfAll bulbs should be in their own canopy with a highly polished reflector. By doing this you can increase the light to the tank by almost 250%! When all lamps are side by side they cannot reflect off the reflector but try to reflect off each other. In my opinion many people are spending alot more than they need to if the setup was right.