Starting over with my tank!

I have not ever found T5 bulbs at either Lowes or Home Depot, I don't know whether they are used in many other applications besides aquaria. As far as MH bulbs you would have to look at the wattage and the color spectrum of the bulbs available. The common wattages used for reef tanks would be 150, 175, 250, or 400. Spectrum is rated in Kelvin (K) which for lack of a better description measures the amount of blue the light gives off. Normal reef tank bulbs would range from 10,000K to 20,000K. I would imagine that the bulbs available at the hardware stores are probably too low of Kelvin, like around 5000K as a guess. If it's in this range it would be very yellow and not look very good over a tank IMO. Next time I'm there (I'm sure this weekend ) I will check it out becuase now I'm curious!

Thanks for the reply Yiyi67, I'm visually impaired. But at Lowes in the lighting depatment the running MH light (one of them) was very bright and had a blue to it. Looked good, let me know what ya find out this week end.

Thanks, HAT

The bulbs at the hardware stores usually don't meet the kelvin requirements of our fish tanks.

I do have a question about the bulbs on E-bay and if anybody had bought them used them and how they are?

Here is a link of some I found today I'm a little skeptical

http://cgi.ebay.com/250W-250-watt-14...item5191f2f1f2

Thanks for the info Fred! I will check that out.

T5 HO lamps are used for general lighting in high celing spaces and should be available at any electrical supply store. But the highest spectrum you'll be likely to find is a "daylight" bulb, which is usually only 5500K or 6700K.

The metal halid lighting you find there only looks blue because your comparing it to the general fluorescent lighting which is usually 3500K or 4100K, both weighted more toward the red end of the spectrum. Even a 4100K lamp will look blue next to a 3500K lamp.

So the short answer is NO, you can't use Home Depot lamps over your reef without getting lots of algae growth. A refugium is another matter, 6700K is perfect for those since you're trying to grow algae there.

Thanks Phil, very informative answer. Guess I won't be going to Home Depot or Lowes for DT lighting.

Lighting design for buildings is part of what I do for a living.

Hey Phil, whats a good med for ich if ya have a reef?

I use to be a stationary engineer in a building Phil. Then I went blind and had to resign. :<

Originally Posted by fchidsey

The bulbs at the hardware stores usually don't meet the kelvin requirements of our fish tanks.

I do have a question about the bulbs on E-bay and if anybody had bought them used them and how they are?

Here is a link of some I found today I'm a little skeptical

http://cgi.ebay.com/250W-250-watt-14...item5191f2f1f2

The best way I can put this is... RUN! Don't look back at those bulbs. There's a VERY good reason why they are so cheap.. because they are CHEAP! I tried some eBay bulbs and they looked GREAT for 6 weeks then for one went "Yellow" for a week then it quickly shifted into the Red/Orange spectrum. Within a week the other one did the same thing. "Lucky" for me I bought (4) when I bought and guess what.. they ALL did this in less than 2 months time. I bought (4) for the price I'd normally pay for (1). You get what you pay for and I ended up wasting almost $100 that should have gone into QUALITY bulbs.

Trust me when I say, "Your tank WILL know the difference between GOOD bulbs and cheap bulbs". Remember there's a lot more to Bulbs/PAR than what our eyes are seeing.

As for Home Depot (or any of the Building/Hardware Supply) bulbs/fixtures you're not going to get any real performance or satisfaction from them. I've seen 1 fixture from HD that was MODDED and used for a frag tank (70w bulb) but he ended up spending more time and $$ than if he would have bought it new already set up for REEFING.

Thanks for the info BigAl! Yeah I've been reaching and I'm going to go with T5 HO's. Going to have 2 bulbs, 1 actinic and one white. Plus my PC's with my LED moonlights. I believe my corals will like that. All on timers where the T5,s have the shortest time. Like Marcs timer setup on his huge tank.

IMHO I'd run my T5's the longest because they have the most PAR and will out-do your PC's many times over. I'd consider the PC's as "supplemental" lighting and T5's as primary.

Wow this is like pm'ing each other, fast reply! Yeah, the T5's will be my primary light, for sure.