Lighting for Fish Tanks

"Ok, the next component we're going to discuss is the light. The light really is lighter in cover. This is called a hood. We call this a full hood. It's really more for you and for the beauty and illumination of the fish. The only practical reason you would need a light as far as the aquarium itself, would be is if you were going to go with live plants, then you would want to go with definitely you would want to go with a fluorescent light which would put off beneficial rays. You would want to take this glass piece off here, so that the live plants can flourish and grow, from the rays from the bulb. But other than that, what the hood does is a couple of things. One is obviously, it will prevent water evaporation. If you don't have a hood, you're going to be filling up your tank a lot more often, just because of the natural evaporation that will occur. So this prevents the water from evaporating, and obviously, the light is going to allow you to enjoy your fish more. Two kinds of lights, incandescent are a little bit more boring color, and one side benefit of incandescent,, it puts off a little heat. So fish do like heat, but we usually recommend florescent, it's just much more colorful, and you can get very creative about different kind of lights, blue light, red light, green light, clear light and so on, and you can consult with your expert there at the shop to go to. I'm going to turn on the light here. It comes on instantly, and this will light up the tank and it will give a beautiful effect. Now on the back here of these hoods, you have little plastic cutaways here for your heater. This comes off very easily for your heater here and a little cutaway here for your filters, to accommodate the filter in the bank of the tanks. So, I'm going to put that on there, and you can see how that really does a nice job of lighting up the tank, and allows you to see its nice bright, even fuse of light that is beautiful to behold and it really brings out the color of the fish much more so than the incandescent or by not having a light at all. So there we have the light."