richard@gryphon.COM (Richard Sexton) (01/17/90)
In article <6822@masscomp.ccur.com> ahv@masscomp.ccur.com (Tony Verhulst) writes: > >Greetings > >After a long absence from the hobby, I have recently set up 55 gal tank. >I really want to grow some nice plants for a change.... this feat has eluded >me in the past. Believe me, you aren't alone. >The hood I bought came with 2 20watt fluorescent tubes and, >judging by the pink color, they appear to be grow-lux. Now, I know after >reading this news group for a month that this won't do at all so I built >a 2 48" tube fixture and put in 2 cool white tubes that I happened to have >handy. I priced Vita-lites and Triton tubes and gagged when I saw what they >were asking for them. Are they REALLY worth the money? Not in my opinion. They're good tubes, and they are supposed to last a fair amount of time and not require the semi-annual changing of the tubes like regular fluorescent, but they aren't cost effective. >The GE chroma 75 or the Philips colortone 50s that I have been reading about >seem to be hard to find in the Greater Boston area - at least I haven't seen >them. What I have seen is are Philips "daylight" tubes. Would a pair of these >be satisfactory? Use the phone and call lighting distributors. Basically there are three classes of light: Plant lights: grow lux and wide spectrum gro lux. Use both in a 1:1 mix. Wide spectrum: Chroma 50 or 75, Colortone 50 or 75, daylight, vita light. The daylight tube is a universal tube made by all the tube manufacturors. It's not as good as the others in this group, but it's still pretty good. Bright lights: Philips Ultralumes. 30U, 35U 41U, 50U These are listed in increasing brightness. You can pretty much mis and match. >O yes, the plants that i'm interested in seem to require (swords and anacharis >etc) seem to require a good amount of light. One of my great problems when >I used alot of light in the past was green algae growing everywhere. >Discussion on the net seems to indicate that this is not necessarilly due >to the abundance of light but rather a large amount of dissolved organics >in the tank. Is this a correct assumption? Anachari is a good choice. It seems to grow anywhere but in soft acid water, and it grows FAST. I mean FAST; you can get > 1" a day growth out of the stuff. Yes, it does require good light. Mine only gets nice and thick and bushy when it gets to the surface and grows right under the fluorescent tube. Although it is seperates from the tube by a piece And yes, controlling nitrates and phosphates seem to be the key to controlling algae. Have just a few small fish. Use a good number of algae eaters (preferably plecos. I agree with Vinny, those dumb flying foxes don't seem to wanna eat a whole lo of algae