# Suggestions for lighting medium and high on 200litre Fluval Roma



## Greeny (26 Nov 2017)

I am researching all I need for a fluval Roma 200litre in regards to medium and high lighting. The hood only has fittings for 2 x T8's and am not considering any DIY replacements to adapt to T5's etc. So I am going to remove the hood completely.

I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions to what I can use for both medium and high lighting. My preference is lighting that can grow most plants or all plants, whether it be t5's, LEDs etc that would be great thanks.

Kind regards

Steve


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## Edvet (26 Nov 2017)

Greeny said:


> lighting that can grow most plants or all plants


Stay with the T8's. All the old skool Dutch tanks were with T8"s. Changing them to T5's uncovered a whole era of algea.


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## zozo (26 Nov 2017)

Ed is probably right, even if you buy LED replacements for the tubes, they excist ready to install, but till now all i've seen are still build with the SMD 5050 led chips, which is fairly outperformed buy newer versions. The 5050 is old and doesn't bring enough for a high light setup, not even medium depending on the height of the water column. The issues you run into with high light and LED is temperature controll. And this makes it rather expensive.


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## ceg4048 (26 Nov 2017)

Greeny said:


> I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions


Here's a suggestion:

Learn to grow plants with the lights you have, lest you unleash Pandora. There are no plants that "require" high light.
Learn about the other aspects of plant husbandry which are thousands of times more important than how much light you have.

Cheers,


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## Greeny (26 Nov 2017)

Thanks all for your responses so far



Edvet said:


> Stay with the T8's. All the old skool Dutch tanks were with T8"s. Changing them to T5's uncovered a whole era of algea.



Theres no harm nor a lot of cost in trying the 2 T8 tubes first. I assume I would need to make sure I don't inject too much CO2 on a low to medium light output?



ceg4048 said:


> Here's a suggestion:
> 
> Learn to grow plants with the lights you have, lest you unleash Pandora. There are no plants that "require" high light.
> Learn about the other aspects of plant husbandry which are thousands of time more important than how much light you have.
> ...



So does the Tropica guidelines about lighting not count when growing aquatic plants? http://tropica.com/en/guide/make-your-aquarium-a-success/light/


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## ceg4048 (27 Nov 2017)

Greeny said:


> So does the Tropica guidelines about lighting not count when growing aquatic plants? http://tropica.com/en/guide/make-your-aquarium-a-success/light/


Correct, it does not count, because it tells only half the story and it assumes the hobbyists automatically knows the other half.
The benefit of high light is that it induces high growth rates in plants.
Unfortunately, hobbyists tend to misconstrue "growth rate" as being equivalent to "health".
If high light is provided to plants, in order for the plants to have high growth rate simultaneously with high health then the hobbyist must also provide high CO2 and high nutrition.
If sufficiently high CO2 and/or nutrition are not provided under high light conditions then the plants health will fail.
The result is disintegration and algal blooms.

Although it can be said that adding nutrition is very easy, the same cannot be said of CO2, which itself is a multi headed beast, and in fact is the most difficult discipline in the planted tank hobby.
Tropica guidelines never take this factor into account and it never directly warns you of this pitfall other than to list these plants in the "difficulty" category. CO2 techniques are much too complicated for them to elaborate in a simple summary table.

On the other hand, any of their plants can be grown under T8 lighting. The only difference is that the growth rates under T8 will be slow, but a planted tank is much more manageable when the lighting is low. CO2 is more manageable because the demand for the gas is much lower than it is under high lighting.

There is so much to learn in this hobby, aquascaping, proper water flow rate and the distribution, maintenance, cleanliness and nutrition, fault isolation and troubleshooting. The very last thing that should be on your list is spending money or more light. First, assess your filter's flow capacity. Avoid spending money on exotic filter media and instead spend it on a filter that has enough muscle to move water and CO2 to the lower reaches of the tank.
These will yield better return on investment than more light, which only causes more headaches.

A 200L tank is 10X more difficult to establish good CO2 than is a 20L tank, for example, simply because of the mass of water that has to be saturated and the distances involved in moving the saturated water to the plants that need it.

Many have found this out the hard way. CO2 is a toxic substance, so it kills fish quickly and it does not respond the way we would have it. CO2 management is so much more important. I cannot overstress it's importance.

Therefore the wisest course is to start with low light energy to give yourself more room to breathe and to have more margin for error.

Cheers,


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## Greeny (27 Nov 2017)

Thanks a lot Ceg for such a fantastic, extremely informative response. I'm doing a lot of research in order to do my best to avoid the pitfalls and to take the correct path. Sharing your experience in this detail will no doubt really help people starting out have a better chance and success rate so again thanks a lot for sharing.

I will start out with the T8's, 2 x medium size canister filters (had advice for either 1 big or 2 medium size) and CO2 albeit not too high.


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