The Tank

[Redfish]

Gerwin, I ment to ask you the other day. How many white LED bulbs and how many blue LED bulbs are in your frag tank at the store, and what is the wattage per bulb. I have been doing a bit of checking and have been told that for a 60x24x31 tank you would need 250 bulbs at 5 watts a piece for an out put of 250 watts of light into the tank. I am guess here that you would need 250 white led bulbs for the 250 watts of light to go into the tank for SPS growth and the blue led bulbs would be what ever you wanted for the apperance of the the tank. I want to make sure I know what I am doing before telling the wife I am going to spend that kinda money on lights for the new tank, lol.

[Gerwin]

Gerwin, I ment to ask you the other day. How many white LED bulbs and how many blue LED bulbs are in your frag tank at the store, and what is the wattage per bulb. I have been doing a bit of checking and have been told that for a 60x24x31 tank you would need 250 bulbs at 5 watts a piece for an out put of 250 watts of light into the tank. I am guess here that you would need 250 white led bulbs for the 250 watts of light to go into the tank for SPS growth and the blue led bulbs would be what ever you wanted for the apperance of the the tank. I want to make sure I know what I am doing before telling the wife I am going to spend that kinda money on lights for the new tank, lol.

I have somewhere around 125 3 watt bulbs for a whooping 375 watts. But according to your informant I need 250 bulbs at 5 wt each for a crushing 1250 watts! I guess I am doomed to failure but we wont tell my corals in the tank as they seem pretty happy and Jennings seems to have some pretty nice growth off his and he has less than mine. Meh but what do we little people from south MS know...we just dum fish selrs heer.

[Redfish]

When I posted in that forum about how good the lights looked in your tank and that I wanted to get some for my new tank. They came back with, there is no way that Jennings could make the lights for that price. Thats is when they started breaking it down saying you would need 250 bulbs at so many watts at $6.50 per bulb plus the cost of the drivers, and the rest of the materials it should cost double of the price you quoted me, a response that kinda surprised me and had me second guessing the lights. The lights aren't cheap and the down side of spending say $3,000.00 over a period of time on corals for the tank and then losing them because of a light issue, you can understand why I was concerned on if I was going to make a bad decision or not. I was expecting a reply from those in the forum that I am in of, Great deal, go for it. Not, no way you can get them for that price and if you do, your corals will suffer because there is no way you can have enough bulbs in the light set-up at that price. I didn't want to offend either Gerwin or Jennings or his lights. With the price of the new tank, lights, corals and everything else involved, I wanted to get a second opinion, I just got some that I was't expecting.

[Gerwin]

I guess my sense of humor is not easily appreciated in print the beauty is because a par meter tells us alot, light intensity can be measured and there is no real wondering what is enough.
PAR = the light radiation that is used for photosynthesis so if we know the value of the light at depths in the tank it allows you to know where to place corals, when the lights are bad and even what corals you may want to keep.
It also takes the guess work of worrying what opinions are correct and what are not. This is why I bought the thing, so I can better learn about lights myself.
I think lighting options are so large compared to the old days that its getting to be more the look you like and budget you wanna have to spend. T-5 / VHO / MH / HQI / LED / what combinations of all them and lets not forget Natural Sunlight! its the ultimate power. So another advantage of a tank tour is seeing the results and the diversity of success hobbyist get with different reef approaches, I have learned decades ago there is no absolute, I have seen to many things work that experts would tell you never could
Just remember lights is one part of a important equation and water quality another, and specimen you purchase yet another

[C-21 USAF]

+1 for what Gerwin just said!