Tank Lighting

[mrmcdean]

Im placing my new tropical tank in a wall and building a cupboard above to house everything. My question is, how many lighting tubes do I need?

The tank is 30" x 15" x 12" and im keen to grow some nice plants for my little friends as the tank will be visible from 2 sides so I want them to have somewhere to hide.

I read conflicting views about how many bulbs to use. If I just use one bulb that promotes plant growth will it be enough or should I go for 2 ? If I go for 2 bulbs (one of which for the plants) what should I use for the other or does it depend upon the fish ?

Cheers

 

[StarOrbs]

A good general rule is to have 2-3 Watts per gallon but it also depends on what type of plants you are going to have. If you are just going to have a few plants that don't require that much light 2-3 WPG is fine. Make sure the bulbs have a color temperature of 5000K to 7000k and have full spectrum. I used 4 Home depot bulbs that were 5000K and had a full color spectrum which gave me 2.1 WPG on my 55 gallon tank and plants like Amazon Sword grew good could have been better with better soil, Hornwort, Anubias nana. And others similar...

 

[mrmcdean]

Thanks for that.

Will look into the bulbs & plants before going any further.

 

[Stryker]

I've looked all over for somewhere that sells bulbs where the colour temp is listed here in the UK..... no luck so far, so am stuck with over priced aquatic tubes.

 

[yvez9]

I had a very hard time finding good bulbs for my tank too. I went to different hardware stores and couldn't even find power compact lights

I ended up buying from an online store. It wasn't that much more expensive than the bulbs at hardware stores though...

The only thing i manged to find were screw in bulbs power compact lights. Most of them were 2700K but I did find one "daylight". The color was blue so I figure it was near the 10000K range...

Anyway, buying online is usually a lot cheaper than in fish stores...