Well, I live in San Francisco, so the sunlight here is shaky at best (A quantum flux meter is really a desirable purchase though so I can see how much light a cloudy day really provides).
On any particular sun day though light would hit the "tank" (future place of it that is) from about sunrise to 3-4 depending upon the time of year. However it's on the south side of the house so it would be all the time. I did anticipate using some sort of supplemental lighting though.
The whole reason of using direct light through UV block plexi/fiberglass is that the sun would come from different angles throughout the day so any sort of supplemental lighting can fit over the tank and not take away "valuable lighting real-estate", which unfortunately the solatubes would.
The overall idea was to build a top-down/side view tank, very similar to an outdoor one I saw at the Maui Ocean Center, however inside my porch so pollutants would be minimized (and any sort of rainwater), also some exotic ideas are floating around, like cutting a hole in the side of the house and having an indoor/outdoor tank ... but don't want to dwell too much on what I MIGHT be doing down the road.
Now my experience (all one of them
) with a glass tank on a south facing window was really bad, the temperature got really hot over the course of the day 90°F, but the tank was only 38 gallons, so I was wondering how/if that heating scaled up with size, and if that were the case what cooling methods would I need to use. Sometime this summer I might be experimenting with a 300g rubbermaid tub just to try and gauge how the temperature would fluctuate during what would be the "hottest" time of the year.
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