I have a ten gallon tank that is currently holding about a dozen or so plant cuttings of various plants with various light requirements (acquired from a plant swap here that was amazing). Unfortunately, the only light fixture I have for this tank at the time (until the weekend when i can go out and get something else) is a compact fluorescent fixture that holds a 96 watt bulb (yikes!). Would it be better to use this and filter it (I have it on now being filtered through several layers of window screen which definitely darkens the light output). Or would it just be better to, I don't know, put a table lamp next to it for the time being. Or, since it's a quad tube, could I wrap three of them in foil to block the light (would they explode from heat?)? Or should I just fertilize the crap out of it to balance out all the light, which is ultimately going to probably burn the whole tank down? There is no livestock in this tank.
What do you think? I don't want to kill all these free plants!!! They are so beautiful!
Do you have any portable lamp (desk etc) that you can just add a simple daylight CFL too? Like the twisted one's you had bought before. Few days under that kinda light will fry your plants....
If possible, place it in a south or west-facing window, or an east-facing if you have bright sunny days where you are. Planted tanks with only daylight from windows grow very well.
I ended up getting a clip on desk lamp that I can use since its braceless. i'll put a cfl in for now. until i have the time to get a more appropriate permanent fixture, i may also try to take advantage of sunlight!
so i have a cfl twisty in there right now...just to be clear we measure by the actual wattage and not the wattage equivalent, right? i feel silly asking this question after all these lighting threads i've started in the past : |
The cfl equivalent is what you would consider. A 10w cfl is as bright as XX? 60 watt just for sake of argument. But that's way lower than that pc light you have at 96w
You have to look at all when talking CFLs; eg a 26W Daylight bulb is actually 100w light output and they have 1600 Lumens.
Over my 10g I have 2x14w daylights (not the twisted one's but the lil tube looking one's and in comparison these are dimmer).
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