400w de Lamp Recommendations?

sandman450f

Premium Member
I see a lot of comparisions and recommendations on 250 w bulbs, however not much on 400w.

Looking for input on what you feel is the best 400w de in the 14k range to work with M135 ballast and in a reefstar pendant.
 
Yeah, I looked there recently but not much if anything on 400w de's, especially in 14k. In any event (though I didnt check out the spectral plots) based on the low ppfds it doesnt seem like having 400w de on a m135 instead of a hqi is a good way to go. just hoping someone would say otherwise and would be able to give a good bulb match for the 135
 
I'm running 400W DE bulbs in a Coral Vue Pendant with Coral Vue electronic ballast. I've run both 20K Coral vue bulbs and hamiltion 14K bulbs. of the 2, I like the hamilitons the best.

They are still a nice blue white color but are brighter than the 20K's. The corlas look good under them and grow nicely. I don't run atinics and have my lights on for about 10 hours a day. The tank is also situated so that it receives natural Sun Light all day long. Even though the intensety of the sun light overpowers the MH lights, the blue of the MH lights helps to show the floresence color of the corals.
 
I'm using the Hamilton 14k's (in hamiltons reefstar setup) and I do like the color. The growth and coloration of my sps seems decent.

The problem is that when I start checking things out to determine whats the next bulb I'm gonna use, researching pars and what not, you find out that most of the 400w run best on an HQI ballast (best par output) which by designation is a son or agro ballast, often a ballast designed for high pressure sodium lamps.

Par or PPFD performance is pretty dismal on the m135, granted not many DE bulbs have been tested, I believe I have only consistently seen happy reefing and coralvue.

I made the mistake of researching 250w setups, decided to go HQI because of the awseome performance, and then jumped to 400w cause you would naturally figure that a 400w HQI has to be better than 250w HQI right? Hamilton markets their 400w reefstar as being HQI lamp and HQI ballast, but it isnt the ballast that PFO and a couple other HQI makers have settled on as the best to drive HQI lamps. If it werent for the fact that it does light and burn HQI bulbs, I'd call it false advertising....

To date I have not seen a PPFD or any type of performance data on the Hamilton 14k de on a m135, I have seen plenty of SE's on the same ballast.

Man that's the headache you get when you have too much time....
 
Yep.

I picke dup my ballast and pendants used for a really good price. I was originally going with 4 over my 400G tank but instead I'm now using 2 on a light mover along with all of the Natural Sun Light I can get. The tank is 7' long set up on the west end of a 30' X 12' sunroom. The 30' wall of windows faces south so I get a ton of light in the tank all day. If it wasn't for the sun, I'd be running 4 of the XM 10K DE MH bulbs. That's because of the 3' depth of my tank.

here's a link to my thread and some recent pic's of the tank

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=9857719#post9857719
 
Thats pretty nice, but no sunroom here. Had considered funneling skylights down a while back, just one of those hmm.. what if i do this.... scenarios.

I'm still hoping someone w/ the reefstar pendants will show up with an awesome bulb recommendation before i switch back to 10k's, or at least some par or ppfd comparisons for the 14k so I know what I'm really dealing with here. I want to be up to at least the 150-180 range (in the most useful spectrums).
 
Since your in riverside, I'm sure you get just as much, if not more sunlight than I do. Is the tank in a position that you could install a couple of sloatubes and just supliment with MH like I do? That would give you all the light you need and with the 14K MH, give you the colors that you want. Just an idea.
 
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