Lighting a 45 bowfront

Kafir

New member
I have been out of the hobby for a while and am getting back in. I'm going to set up a shallow sand bed with a pretty good amount of LR. I love corals and since I'm going small this time, I'm planning to do mostly corals with minimal fish. I'm not going to run a sump but am tempted to run a plenum as that worked well for me in the past.

My concern right now though is lighting. Since my 45 has a middle strap, I'm nervous about a MH right above it. It would just block sooo much light. Can I pull off PC or T5's or will a single 150w MH be sufficient? Oh, and when I had MH before (3 of them) they were always mogul socket. Are these DE ones more better?

Lastly, whats the story with Coralife lights...dang inexpensive. Seems too good to be true.

Thank you all,
The novice veteran
 
with my 46 bowfront I used a coralife aqualight, and was not very happy with it. The shield for the bulbs cracked and broke, one out of two fans stopped working, one of two LED moonlights didn't work. Just wasn't satisfied, but If I still had the tank I would say a four or maybe six bulb T5 setup would work well
 
I don't have a high opinion of Coralife lighting

T%s are just as good as MH; PC is not in the same league. An Aquatic Life 4 bulb fixture would work well, or a Nova Extreme Pro if you want a 6 bulb fixture. HTH
 
I was under the impression that T5's can't do SPS. Was I misled?

^^I see in your sig you've got some...guess I was misled.

Disregard and thanks for the help.
 
T5's can keep SPS, it's power compact flourescents that aren't able to keep them. There are many people (and a few tanks of the month) that only use T5's and keep many hard corals
 
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