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Growth issues

He is also selling an Arcadia ACE254 light unit with 2 x T5 marine white bulbs £25. I could screw that into the underside of the lid and change a bulb to a plant growth?
 
Spectrum of the bulb makes no difference to plant growth. Using the marine bulbs the plants will look washed out and not very green but will adapt and grow fine. You need to choose tubes that make your plants look "nice" see the sticky thread on lighting forum section.

On saying that a freshwater and a plant gro bulb do make the plants stand out. The plant gro is slightly pinkish and plants don't look right if used alone. Anyway either tube plants grow fine.
 
Just an update, I've bought the T5's and I'm shocked just how bright they are . I'm definitely going to need something to reflect the lights as my lid isn't containing it! So tomorrow I will make the fixings to attach them to the tank then look for some sort of reflectors. Will post a pic to show you when I'm done!
 
Hum... tired of people saying spectrum doesn't affect plant growth... Color spectrum is everything... If it wasn't why do you think growers for veggies and other plants for indoor use, use pink lighting ? Pink, reds and blue encourage flowering and better faster growth.

Garuntee if we had identical tanks and you used all blue actinic marine bulbs like you stated.. I could grow my plants far better with a 2/3 Pink light, and 1/3 6700k for the green colorspectrum to make the tank look bright and not dim from the pink lighting.

I wish people in fish tanks with plants would wise up and learn that lighting I don't care how much power and intensity you throw at the plants doesn't matter if you don't have the correct color spectrum.. A low light tank with more Pink lighting will out grow a medium light tank using 6700/10k or actinic lighting.. The only problem with PINK lighting is well it makes tanks look pink or dark... If you have 4 tubes to light a tank... Toss 3 pink grow bulbs on and 1 10k light and youll solve that problem... The problem with most people is they just throw 1,000 watts or a million lumens or 10k PARS over a tank and think... wow its a lot of power and its very bright.... wrong..

http://inhabitat.com/indoor-vertical-farm-pinkhouses-grow-plants-faster-with-less-energy/
 
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candymancan said:
Color spectrum is everything
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Again not quite true. Plants have evolved to make use of two areas of the white spectrum from the sun, the red end and blue end, as possibly when they evolved (as algae) other plants/animals were already using the middle of the spectrum or primitive atmosphere blocked the green light.

Thus you can grow plants very well with red or blue light, plants will adapt to use it. We know plants don't use the green part of the spectrum efficiently as they reflect it.

However generating blue light to grow plants, which has a higher energy per photon, requires a lot more energy to produce. So if you are growing commercially where you want to maximise your energy input to plant mass out, red is the way to go. However red has issues, in generating sufficiently powerful red lighting and also not good to place to work in, everything is either red or black and distance perception is affected. However adding a few other colours eg yellow/white makes it easier to work in and plants still grow the same. Handy lights to do this are things like sodium lights. Very energy efficient but not very good as tank lighting as there is no green or blue.

Of course to get even more growth once you have maxed out the red end of the spectrum you can use blue light as well. Before LED's there wasn't any easy way to do this eg mercury arc lights, you always ended up producing green light as well which is wasted as reflected by the plants. So now with LED's you can now efficiently generate huge amounts of light without any green, which is in fact pinkish, as your article shows.

In your tank though you need a spectrum with green in or else plants won't look nice in the plant growing efficient pink light.

Thus as you say you need to mix the tubes so that plants get a lot of spectrum they can use as well as provide green so your plants look nice.
 
The Don said:
Just an update, I've bought the T5's and I'm shocked just how bright they are . I'm definitely going to need something to reflect the lights as my lid isn't containing it! So tomorrow I will make the fixings to attach them to the tank then look for some sort of reflectors. Will post a pic to show you when I'm done!
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Be careful now, you now have some "big boy" lights and with possible reflectors over plants not used to decent levels of light. If you just whop them in the plants will suffer and melt away into algae soup.

You need some way of bring the light level up, slowly from current levels to some thing higher and think about fertilisers and carbon source if you want high light levels. If you have reflectors, you can rotate them round shielding some of the light, this is what I did when I started high tech (with T8 tubes) I ran for first couple of months with reflectors deflecting a lot of light away from the plants. Plants bedded in, but no algae. Eventually rotated round to provide full light. Now got T5 and increased lighting and did make the mistake of just whopping in the T5's without making any attempt to lower levels or shorten light time and guess what algae.....
 
Just an update the bulbs got secured in the tank and I'm now looking for refectors as the light was over whelmingly bright. It seems myself and the fish were going to take a while to get used to it, I painted the top of the lid black to stop so much light escaping but unfortunately when doing a water change a second ago I realised why a reflector can be important as the water splashed one of the bulbs and blew it up so I'm down to one until I get another one. Which I will go for the plant growth bulb rather than another Marine white! That said one bulb looks ok?
263C0D3D-BCEF-434D-B8F7-20629141F795_zpseoenfxw7.jpg 9C5601E7-AFDF-4F9F-8424-4DF67773D983_zpsrgsvnqls.jpg
 
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