lighting a 180 softie reef

if you only intend to keep the softies and shrooms then you could get by with just 2 VHOs. i had a 4 bulb VHO setup a six foot 180g yrs ago and kept LPS as far down as the bottom of the tank and even kept a few digitas up around the top.

with that said I'd recommend looking into T5 instead of the VHO, two 5' bulbs would give you plenty of light and would cover the tank nicely so you wouldnt notice the 6" less bulb on each end.
 
I would go with 8 36" t-5's that will give you some nice lighting options. As well as allowing you to get some nice LPS if you wanted.
 
that'd be plenty for most things, if you wanted clams on the sandbed they'd need to be larger ones but other then that the above setup would be a good choice.
 
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