So finally, after 10 months of staring at the crappy color that my tank was from the stock fixture… New Bulbs!
Over a 125g I have a 6ft, 6 bar T5 Aquaticlife light fixture. It houses 12 x 39watt (36’’) bulbs. It came with 1/2 10k’s and 1/2 blue combo bulbs (10 months old). Ughh, it was completely WHITE with all the lights on. Coral growth… i thought was decent, that was until i saw the new growth after 1 month of the new lights…wow!
The new bulbs are all ATI… 4 bars of Blue Plus…1 bar actinic…1 bar Aquablue Special. I did try a bar of Purple Plus, but i really didn’t like the color, made stuff look browned out to me…and it completely washed out yellow tones… ( my tang went from regular mustard … to spicy brown) lol.
The color IMO now is perfect, and those blue + bulbs are SO BRIGHT! I’ve noticed an increase in growth, and dramatic increase in color, especially the red Monti Cap. Chris helped me out with changing out the bulbs, and videoing the footage of before and after PAR measurements. There was a huge increase in the par readings…100+ par.
We video’d the par meter, as well as the probe, and did a little picture-in-picture action for the video! enjoy
WOW! John, talking about big differences. Soo much brighter and nicer looking tank. I’m sure your corals appreciate its. Now better coloring corals. Way to go!
Awesome John, the tank color looks a ton better and the results are great. That’s great you took the video to document the change. Makes me want to go and pick up some new bulbs for sure!
i got a question I bought 2 types of actinic lights . One from marineland and the other from coralife. The marineland bulbs are a really dark blue while the coralife are purple. They were both actinic just wondering why one is different color . By the way where can i get some API bulbs
Hello Nem, Actinic is sort of a vague term that just means blue, or floureceing or so something like that. What you want to look at when buying blue bulbs is where is its blue peak. good old true actinic has a high peak at 420 nm on the light spectrum. LEDs and royal blue actinic bulbs have little 420 nm blue light but peak to the right on the spectrum at somewhere between 450 -475 nm. both of these are fine for two different types of chlorophyls that grow in the corals symbiotic zooxanthalae. Chorophyl A works best with 420nm blue. and chlorophyl B is most productive at around 452 nm blue. uh, see this here chart…
both chlorophyls feed your coral carbs. its like the coral has two mouths. you can feed A or you can feed B. and it will get along. or… you can feed both and see what really happens. coral growth and color depends a lot on how these two zooxanthalae chlorophyls function. So i like to feed them both good blue light at both 420nm and 452 nm or there abouts. More burgers! Yumm!!
A good true actinic 420 nm bulb chart looks like this. 420 also seems to make them glow undeer just actinic ligh and flourese.
and a royal blue actinic will chart like this.
These will augment your white light bulbs. I have noted that lower kelving white bulbs under 12,000K have a strong blue peak at 420nm. with these i like to use 452 nm blue to augment them.
and higher kelvin white bulbs have their blue peak at only 452 nm, so i use 420 nm actinic blues to round them out.
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