OllieNZ
Member
Hi All,
I'm getting another tank and looking at setting it up as a reef tank, firstly best forum for reef keeping? and secondly a question about t5s. For a planted tank I'm happy to use my bulbs till they die but the reef guys seem really jittery about using them for more than 12 months and start going on about things like spectral drift and degradation, now according to various bulb manufacturers you're looking at something like 10% lumen degradation over the life of the bulb, does this correspond equally with par degradation? I can't find any data on this at all. The bulb manufacturers seem only concerned about lumens which is fair enough as they are only concerned with how well the bulbs light an office or workshop. All the other info seems to be the same recycled "you need to change your bulbs once a year or they loose too much brightness and the spectrum drifts and favors nuisance algae" yet no one seems to provide any hard data to back this up. So thoughts people?
I'm getting another tank and looking at setting it up as a reef tank, firstly best forum for reef keeping? and secondly a question about t5s. For a planted tank I'm happy to use my bulbs till they die but the reef guys seem really jittery about using them for more than 12 months and start going on about things like spectral drift and degradation, now according to various bulb manufacturers you're looking at something like 10% lumen degradation over the life of the bulb, does this correspond equally with par degradation? I can't find any data on this at all. The bulb manufacturers seem only concerned about lumens which is fair enough as they are only concerned with how well the bulbs light an office or workshop. All the other info seems to be the same recycled "you need to change your bulbs once a year or they loose too much brightness and the spectrum drifts and favors nuisance algae" yet no one seems to provide any hard data to back this up. So thoughts people?