supplemental lighting

[braytag]

Hi guys, I'm currently the proud owner of a 220g 75*24*36 little tank. The tank is about 6 month old (was an upgrade from a 50G), so the tank/inhabitants are more like 2 years old. have sump, swc skimmer bal bla bla...

For my lihnting I was running an icecap 660 2x48 2x54 T5. The ballast finally gave way after a few years of services.

I made the jump to LED, proton 32x2 with 60o optics (as recommended on their web site)

The problem I'm running is that the lighting is very directionnal, I kinda need supplemental lighting for the back of the tank/corners. And I kinda blew right through my budget for the next few months.

So I installed 4 light sockets with CFL in them, kinda did the trick, but I would rather have a "whiter" color, any ideas? are the "light bulb socket type" Led any good? Any other ideas? trying to make it as cheap as possible.

It's not for coral growth, just genral illuminaiton.
thanks.

[Tweaked]

Par30 bulbs from the big box stores in a kelvin 5k or higher would be good and inexpensive.

[kenjung]

I'm a big fan of Ecoxotic stunner strip most DIY LEDs can benefit from Blue/Magenta stunner color will pop.

[zachts]

Are you using 2700k CFLs or the white daylight ones that are up around 6500k?

The latter should give you a pretty white look paired with your LEDs.

As far as the future goes if you still have the parts from your old T5 setup just put two of them back into service one front and one back of the tank, and pick up a new ballast to drive the two. a new ballast should be only around $50 locally or so, and you probably have plenty of still good bulbs laying around, since they'd only be used for supplemental brightness you can just run them till they burn out on a proper T5 ballast. (the IceCaps liked to fry if a bulb burned out during operation......)

[Fishyoga]

Not sure precisely what the color of these would look like:
http://www.verilux.com/full-spectrum-lightbulbs/compact-fluorescent-cfl/
but I have a desklamp with the same lighting in it that I use for supplemental lighting in my 10g.
I have a post going now to see what other ideas people have had or used.
The lighting from this Mfg. seems to do more for my tank than the stock LED unit that came with it. My Button Polyp definitely prefers this light!

[braytag]

right now i'm running 5k cfl.

I can't seem to find any good t5 ballasts... they are like 80$ for a marine glo... ehhh how about no...

I'll keep looking.

[zachts]

Sylvania or Advance T5 ballasts can be found at any big box hardware store for around $50 or less. They may not be the best in the world but are just fine if using them for supplemental lighting. Here's two that would work just fine.

http://www.lightingsupply.com/icn2s54-90c.aspx
http://www.lightingsupply.com/icn2s54-90c-n.aspx