Lighting weirdness....

[dantodd]

I just upgraded from 2 very old 250w iwasaki bulbs on my 72 to 2 relatively new 400w XM 10000K bulbs.

My clowns are now swimming around the tank way more than usual. I'm sort of stumped as to why they'd do that. Hopefully my anemones will start splitting more and I'll probably be adding some more light demanding corals now too.

 

[TOURKID]

How did u put 400watt bulbs into 250 watt ballests?

That is weird! My clowns got all weirded out when i went from pc's to mh

 

[dantodd]

new ballasts too!

 

[TheVillageIdiot]

that's a lot of light for that tank. are you planning on a ritteri? They probably just need time to get used to the new light and will settle down after a while.

some egg crate on the top of the tank to help diffuse the light over the next week or two might help. on top of the egg crate take the fibermesh screening used on screen doors (available at HD and lowes) layer up 4 or 5 thick on each piece of egg crate and remove 1 every other day until you are down to the crate, then remove that.

If you don't have any photo synthetic critters in there (aside from algae), you probably don't even need to do any of that...

 

[dantodd]

Well, it's a long story but I may well be trading the 400s for 250s. If I do keep the 400s they will probably end up over a ritteri.

 

[TOURKID]

What happened to the t5's? *grin*

After the thread when we were talking about em.. I went to phishys and talked about t5 vs mh for quite awhile.

I now have a handy dandy price list of ALL the oceanic tanks that are 4 ft long... Guess Ill be trying the t5 route after I can afford the tank lol

 

[dantodd]

well. that was before I found a dual ballast and "relatively" new bulbs for $200.

 

[dantodd]

also... This may well end up in Cameron's school tank. Either one of these will be on the school tank or one of my old 250s will be.

It seems that there aren't as many good deals on T5s these days because there aren't that many people moving AWAY from them.

After 6 hours my BTA seem to be absolutely basking in the new light.