Lighting for a Saltwater Fish Tank

Video Transcript

"If you're starting a saltwater tank and you already have the tank, you probably have a standard fluorescent hood with a normal output bulb. This is a standard output hood strip light. The normal output bulb that's a 50 50 bulb has a slightly blue tint so it'll be OK for a saltwater tank, for a fish only tank. It might help maintain the live rock but it's only about 18 watts and not adequate for the size tank that this light fixture would be on. So again this is called a normal output bulb. The way to identify a normal output bulb is well you can tell by this standard tombstone fixtures and tombstone holders for the light bulbs. It'll have a low wattage and the tombs have two pins on each side that are the standard distance just like the fluorescent lights in your ceiling. Again that's called a normal output light fixture. And there are different options for the color temperature of the bulb. And some of them are pretty expensive but again it's the wattage you want not the price. What has become very popular is a power compact bulb. This is a power compact fixture. Power compact bulbs have the pins on one side. Now there's two different pin arrangements on the power compacts. A common one is a straight pin arrangement and I'll show you what that looks like. This is a power compact bulb. You can see it's an expensive bulb so they packed it really nicely. It has 4 pins on one end. It's two little tubes that are connected so often times when people are asking for the bulb they tell me they have two bulbs. This is a single bulb with one set of pins. And most fixtures are fairly easy to replace. You pull out the slide and place it in and put the slide back in, you're good to go. Power compacts these are, this is the average size power compact bulb, they're 65 watts each so this would put 130 watts of light onto your tank compared to the strip light that we put the same tank that does only 18 watts. So as you can see there's a lot more energy being put into the tank and that would be adequate for corrals. What has become more popular lately is a new type of fluorescent tube called a T5. T5's are generally a high output bulb. There are some normal output T5 fixtures just to add to the confusion but generally when people are talking about T5s, they're talking about a high output T5 bulb. This is a very skinny bulb, it's about a half inch wide and the pins are very close together and it requires a certain ballast to run it so you need the light fixture for a T5 to run, you can't just buy the bulb and install it in your standard aquarium fixture. But these lights are a little more efficient then the power compacts, they throw a lot more light for the watts used. This bulb is a 39 watt bulb compared to a 36 watt normal output bulb, this would throw a lot more light. Another type of lighting that people use are metal Halide lights but I won't go into that, maybe we can show a picture of a metal Halide fixture, that you would want to do a lot more research before you decide to purchase. Generally I would recommend the power compacts because the ease of acquiring them but if you want to get a little more involved, make a better investment, possibly look into a T5 unit."