i went into my lfs looking for lighting for one of my tank in order to try and bring out the colour of my fish. after much deliberation i ended up buying of caralife 50/50 bulbs. they have a mix of 50% natural daaylight and 50% actinic blue. for the $90 price tag i left hoping that the differnce in the look of my tank would show a definete improvement.

well i wasnt disappointed. the colour is much more enhanced on my oscars and the spangling on my acara really stands out now. well to make a long story short i was wondering what type the rest of you use in your aquariums.

basically, daylight is the most common. but did you know
that the incandescent bulbs gives us 85% of the natural
colors of any objects. unfortunately, it is not cool to
the eyes of the lookers.

in my tank, i used compact flourescent lamp (cfl)warmwhite,
no diffuser to give a better natural color view of my o.

The main reason keeping me out of 50/50 lamps is that I keep planted tanks and the standard fluorescent works well for the range I use. I believe 50/50 are designed for reef/coral tanks. In my Oscars I keep the light as dim as possible, for their comfort. I am slowly bringing up the WPG but intend to keep it as low-light (around 2WPG), actually I'm sitting at 0.7WPG (started with a bit over 0.2)

So far my answer is: Standard aquarium use fluorescent lamps. I am considering upgrading to Compact Fluorescent (I believe there are 96W lamps that are 34.5" long)

Pepe
Santo Domingo

i use interpet tropical bulbs ..they have a pink/purple hue to it, i positon one 48"bulb to the front of the tank so the back of the tank is in shaddow,the surface ripples transfer right through the water down to the substrate,creating great shaddows and the pink hueshows great colours on all species.... best bulbs i have ever used!!!!!!!!!!they are 40 watt and i got a blue attanic marine bulbs that come on 2 hrs before the main bulb and 2 hrs after, as not to shock the 0,s...they are 40 watt also and go out on timers when the main bulb comes on ...one blue attanic marine at the back and the tropical glo at the front

pepetj wrote:


with these new bulbs(2 three foot bulbs) on my tank my wpg comes in at 3. since it has primarily a blue tint to the total lumens emmitted is actually less than the regular fluorescent and imho looks fabulous