diy hallogen lighting

[pana]

just afew questions wanting to know about starting my own hallogen lighting setup...



firstly the amount of watts i would need for a meter long tank...


secondly the type of halids you would recommend...

temperature issues as im only using two fluros at the moment..



ideas of your own diy hallogen setups..

[bebitte70]

I don't know if youre considering putting halogen lighting for saltwater but you will get nothing but algae problems or if you want a halogen light fixture and convert it to hold a metal halide fixture.

[CoolUsername]

Halogen lighting is not recommended for reef corals for two main reasons.

It is grossly inefficient which generates a lot of heat. Cooling is a greater issue then too. So cost lots of money per lumen and costs more money in cooling. So basically it isn't econimical to do halogen since the running costs are greater.

And most importantly the color spectrum is wrong for corals. Might be great for algae as the previous thread indicated, but coral growth will suffer.

So basically flourescent lighting (Compact flourescent, VHO, T5) and Metal Halide lighting is recommended for both running cost and color spectrum.

[CHAOSTACTICS]

i second the above posts, plus the look of halogen lighting is terrible

[Qwiv]

Yah, you don't want to use halogen. Not saying you can't, but you should not. The reason is that halogen is basically a high power incandecent bulb. The light produced is from heating a filament. A lot of the energy is heat. The next user of energy is infared light, which you can't see but it heats the water. The remaining bit is light of a spectrum corals barely use. To high of a spectrum. Basically you are getting a very bright/hot light with low PAR. Your corals care about the PAR. Plus, it looks terrible. I know a $20 light is tempting, but at the end of the day, you just wasted $20. You will get more usable light from a $15 NO florecent light strip and save a lot of electricity.

You also mentioned halides. These are not the same lights and are not interchangable.

[Keelay]

Yep the long term (not very far away) is that it will be more expensive using halogen

[Al G Blenny]

Man! Two Hokey Pokey fans on the same thread!