Help w/lighting

[angelkitty]

Hello everyone - I'm new here and wanted to pick some brains for lighting in my goldie tank! First let me say I read the excellent article on lighting but it's a "bit" over my head and I'm still confused.

I currently have a 40 gal tall Eclipse System aquarium. I have two goldies and have driftwood and java ferns. I've had the tank for about 10 years and pretty much stayed with the T8 24" inch 5500-6000 daylight bulbs (2).

I've only had my java ferns for about a year and they aren't growing very well. I picked java ferns mainly because of the goldies and secondly because they are low light plants.

The one thing I did glean from the article is that blue light penetrates deeper water, so I thought about changing and trying either two 50/50 actinic/daylight bulbs or something like one AquaGlo and one PowerGlo. I started to go with an Ocean Sun 10,000K but wasn't sure about that either! I would really like some "blue" in the tank but not sure if that's the best for goldies.

Any advice is greatly appreciated! Thanks!

[Carl]

The problem with "blue" light in freshwater aquariums is that it also increases algae growth (which is fine for Reef tanks as the symbiotic zooanthellic algae is necessary within corals)

Also your tank height/depth does not warrant blue light either.

At best maybe 10,000K will give you a more crisp light, however my personally recommendation is a 6500K light.
It is also important to change this light once per year even if is still illuminating as the important PAR spikes will fade with time and mostly the middle visible light energy remains.

Also See:
Aquarium Lighting; such as the Basic Tank Set up section near the bottom.

BTW, welcome to Everything Aquatic

Carl

[angelkitty]

Thanks Carl!

I kind of thought blue light might increase the algae but I wasn't sure...I don't need any extra help with that stuff!

I have to admit I am not very good about changing out the bulbs so I will have to do better on that....

I recently started using Purigen along with Matrix Carbon in my filter and it's done a great job keeping the algae at bay.

Again, thanks for the advice and the welcome!

[parker002]

I have two 10000K T5s on my tank and my plants are doing pretty good, especially my Amazon sword and water sprite. However, my Java fern is growing very slowly.

On the other hand, my daughter's 14G tank came with a standard screw-in hood. We replaced the two 15W incandescents with $7 ZooMed 6500K 10W CFLs from the local nursery and her plants look AWESOME.

[Suzie Q (Lori)]

Can't add anything to it...I was going to recommend 6500K lighting too...I'd say that is a good "rule of thumb" on lighting.