lighting??????????

[randolph]

was going to use 4-40 watt bulbs on my 55 gal, thinking i would have 160 watts. lfs said to me that it isn't so much the wattage as it is the intensity of the bulb ( meaning that 1-96 pc is brighter that 4-40s 48 inch bulbs)said that if you looked at the 4-40s in your face and then the 96 watt pc.....the pc would make you squint more than the 4-40s,
agree or disagree with this analogy? <img src="graemlins//confused.gif" border="0" alt="[confused]" /> <img src="graemlins//urrr.gif" border="0" alt="[urrr]" />

 

[treble]

agree

 

[david s]

agree i thought about it and i thought of a room with 10 100watt bulbs wouldnt be bad lookin at then take a 1000 watt spot and look at that lol would be a little diff

 

[reefcrazy]

your lfs is right now the question is what are you planning on keeping on that 55 if you want only softis i would go ahead and use only 4 40w bulbs but if you are talking about lps i would go with 4 pcs or 4 vho and if you want sps get mh i would recomend for sps 2 250w mh with two 40w atinic bulbs or insted of the 2 40s get 2 vhos atinics, is up to you on what you realy want to keep.
i keep two 175w mh and 3 40w 2atinics and 1day light bulbs with my softis and i plan on getting some lps.

 

[kris walker]

I think I disagree. The only reason the one PC makes squint is because you are looking right at the 96 input-Watt light source. You can't look right at the 4 40-Watt NO bulbs at the same time, so you don't squint. This IMO is a question of the light source dimensions. The smaller the dimensions of the source for a given output lumens, the "brighter" it appears. If there was some way of taking all 4 NO bulbs, putting them into the same physical space represented by the 1 PC, then the NO bulb would be a lot brighter.
But forgetting all this, when you have lights incident on a surface, they lumens from different light sources simply mathematically add up. PC and NO have roughly the same efficacies (output lumens per input Watt), so 1 96 Watt PC is *roughly* equivalent to about 2 40 Watt NOs. And if you add 2 more NO's, you simply have more lumens on the surface.
EDIT: I still agree though that you should go with the PC's or VHO'S instead of the 4 NO bulbs.
Just my opinion,
kris