TropTrea
New member
I do see your point however with my experimenting I aproached it differently. The Blue plus bulbs suposedly have a peak at 420nm and another peak between 454 and 460 nm. But it is also a wide spectrumed bulb that produces light as low as 400nm and as high as 520 nm. Given the normal sensativity of the human eye we see green light much more readily than we see blue or near violet light. So it is understandable that the Blue Plus will look more green to us an 420nm atinic bulb.
For me when I switched to 6 blue plus bulbs, with one purple and one ge 6500 my first impression was it was way to blue. After getting used to the color I lost that feeling. Personlay I believe it was my eye getting adjusted to seeing the bluer color.
About a year ago I added a strip of 6 LED's 456nm royal blues as moon lights. These were 3 watt LED's that I was running at roughly about 1/2 watt each. When I ran them alone at night it was wow only the florescene was visable. But now remember LED's cover specific wavelenghts and there is basicly 0 light below 439nm or above 469nm. So I upped the wattage to 3 watts per LED and use them as pre-dawn and post dusk now. They still produce fantastic florescense even more so than before.
In my playing with this I tried some so called 420 nm LED's and they produced less florescence than the 454's did and also gave the tank a pink look. They did however bring out a little yellow florescense that I had not seen before on some LPS corals. My next try was the atinics as they are suposed to be strong at 420 nm and still give a range of some blues. They did give some florescense but not nearly what the 454 nm LED's did.
As comparison the 18 watts of 454 nm LED's gave much more florescense than 108 watts of 420nm T-5 Atinics. But the Atinic T-5's did give more florescense than the Blue plus bulbs did.
I have also experimented on another tank with LED's. I have found that 454 Royal Blue LED's bring out some florescent patterns and that 460 nm LED's bring out other floresecent paterns. Yes some patterns are the same with either but others corals look different mainly chifting from a yellow green color to a blue green color of florescense. With both on they produce a green closer to but more intense than what I see with T-5 Blue Plus bulbs.
I'm starting to think that the ideal lighting fixture is a combination of T-5's and LED's. The LED's targeting the 454 to 460 nm range and the T-5's filling in the gaps between 420nm and 500 nm. The full spectrum mid day range can be covered with either the T-5's or the LED's.
