Lighting Options For Juwel Trigon 190l

[scubadoo]

I have a juwel trigon 190l (bought second hand) which currently has 2 x 18W fluorescent lights with reflectors.

I intend growing live plants, but probably species which dont require lots of light, since at about 0.72W/USG I dont have much light.

I'm looking into the options available to me, and have thought of the following:

Get new tubes - the existing ones are about 12 months old. If so, what are the best tubes to get - I've heard a bit about arcadia lamps, but what colour tubes are best?
Also, can you just get a tube of the same size with a higher light output - bit like tungsten lamps where you can fit a lamp from say 10W to 100W in the same housing?
If possible, then I could just get 2 new higher output tubes. Somehow I dont think that this is possible.

If I wanted to upgrade the lighting by adding more I assume I'm into a DIY job which could get messy because its a corner tank, so space is limited for standard strip flou. solutions.
Has anybody else added lights to a Trigon ?

thanks in advance

scuba

 

[Egmel]

Also, can you just get a tube of the same size with a higher light output - bit like tungsten lamps where you can fit a lamp from say 10W to 100W in the same housing?
If possible, then I could just get 2 new higher output tubes. Somehow I dont think that this is possible.

Don't know a lot about lighting in general but I do know that if you exceed the wattage of the lighting ballast for any period of time you will cause it to burn out.

Replacement ballasts don't look to be that expensive (anything from £20 up) so maybe that's the way to go if you want to up your light output.

My advice would be to find out exactly what's in your hood at the moment, not just bulbs but ballasts too, then decide on how much you actually want it to output. Then take into account cost and space to decide which is the best way forward - extra bulb, higher rated ballasts etc.

As for what colour temp light you need, that's partly up to you as an aesthetics question (do you want warm or cold light?) the higher the kelvin the bluer the light, natural daylight is about 5600K and average room lights are around 4900K. There's an interesting wiki on it here though it looks like we have different opinions on colours!

Finally - there's a good pinned post about lighting in the plants section with a link to a thread about some good bulb stores.

Hope this helps.

 

[scubadoo]

Thanks for the response egmel.
george's article was very useful - I have read it before but forgot about it.

I will look a bit closer at the current lighting set-up, but I suspect that since it is all part of juwel's set-up that the ballast will be matched to the tubes installed (ie 2 no. 18W).

I think its going to be a case of a couple of replacement tubes first, then if that's not enough for the plants I have, then I'll have to add some new units (maybe a couple of small T5's)...........

which if I get up to 2 W/g will probably then mean CO2

.....

need a bigger wallet !

 

[stevep113]

http/www.fishforums.net/content/forum/20...es-190l-Trigon/

Have a look at the link above it was my post and shows the extra compact t5 i added to the rear, also have an extra tube in the front.

Steve.