I have a three gallon eclipse tank just recently set up with live rock and sand from an established tank. I've removed the bio wheel filtration and replaced it with an ac 30 hob. I would like to keep a couple blasto's in it and have been doing a lot of research on them. My main concern is the lighting. Many people say that you should use metal halide lighting and then shade them but what would be the ideal lighting situation that would allow me to keep them right out in the open. Right now I just have the stock lighting (6w t-5 daylight) on it but if needed I have a 70w metal halide with 18w pc actinic fixture or a 2x18w power compact fixture I could use. What would you guys reccomend? Any other other tips on this species would be appreciated as well. Thanks.
three gallon and blasto's
- Thread starter mikey77
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Thanks for the response gflat. So it sounds like the pc fixture would probably be o.k. I guess since I have both fixtures anyway I'll just start them out with the pc's and see how things go. If I did end up going the 70w (pheonix 14k) halide route do you think I would need to be really careful about acclimation with these corals?
gflat65
New member
I'd acclimate anything with a step from anything under MH to MH, esp. DE's. I don't know what the DE 70W's put out, but my 250DE's blast. If you upgrade, I'd acclimate over a week or two min. Shortened light cycle and maybe screen. When I upgraded from 175W SE to 250W DE, I slowly increased the photoperiod for about five weeks and still burned some acros.
They like shaded but high quality light... MH's are great because they reflect off the front glass a little then under the rock. I always did really poorly with blasto wellsi, I had a couple of $100 + colonies. They always slowly deteriorated. Finally traded them away for next to nothing. Now I come to find out my buddy has a lot of colonies doing really well in the shade!
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