100% Natural sunlight..

[sundancer]

Sunlight sounds like a great idea but I wonder how enjoyable it is to sit in a chair with the sun beating down on your shoulders just to look at your tank and you will still need artificial light to enjoy your tank at night. For propagation I think it's the way to go but for a private display tank it has much drawbacks.

 

[hahnmeister]

You can direct the light from sola tubes or skylights to light just the tank... or rather, light it just like some fixtures would, without having it 'beating down on your shoulders' at the same time. If you took the same intensity of sunlight compared to the same intensity of halides, the sunlight would actually be cooler since the only heat you get from sunlight is radiant... where bulbs in general will generate 4x as much heat since the ballasts and bulbs conduct/convect about 3/4 of their incoming electricity or more directly into heat, and only about 25% or less of that gets converted to light. So sunlight can really help keep the room and rest of the house cooler compared to artificial lighting.

Another way of putting it... you can have 100 watts of lighting come into a room from the sun and it will be as bright as 400 watts of artificial (most likely more since artificial loses efficiency as you get bluer). Thats 300 watts of heat you get to do without for sunlight.

And for 'after hours' viewing, yes, having SOME artificial lights is a must. But rather than say... 1600 watts to light an entire 500g, you can get away with less than half of that since you arent looking for peak intensity... just viewing intensity.

 

[OceanDweller]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=13428154#post13428154 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by sundancer
Sunlight sounds like a great idea but I wonder how enjoyable it is to sit in a chair with the sun beating down on your shoulders just to look at your tank and you will still need artificial light to enjoy your tank at night. For propagation I think it's the way to go but for a private display tank it has much drawbacks.

Yeah holmes and this is why you use actinic lighting or supplemental halides or T-5's though alot of people are somewhat content that own sola-tube and skylight systems. I mean 5 250 watt mh systems on a 700 gallon adds a ton of heat as well... or you could just cut a huge hole in your room, much more cost effective in areas with high power and light, Texas, Cali, Florida...

btw at night its even better, the moon on a natural cycle, how long have we been trying to imitate that as hobbiests.