# Lighting question/opinions



## Sidius (Mar 25, 2012)

Hey All you planted tank gurus .. I'm looking to get your opinions on lighting for a new 180 gallon tank build I'm going to be working on over the next couple months. I'm looking at a couple different Aquatic Life T5HO fixtures and I'm going to be trying to plant as heavily as I can without restricting too much space for my Africans. For plants I'm going to be keeping the following Narrow Leaf Giant Hygro (Hygrophila corymbosa), Dwarf sagittaria, Amazon Sword, Anubias and possibly Java Fern if I can get my fish to stop eating it lol (there may be more added down the road but I'm limited due to ph/hard water conditions for Africans).

Option 1
Aquatic Life Light T5 HO 8-Lamp 6-Lunar Aquarium Light, 72-Inch
It's a 72" fixture with 8x39W T5HO, 6 LED moonlights and I'll be going with a combination for Aquaflora, Midday and Actinic (all Giesemann bulbs) using the built-in timer. This works out to only 1.7W per gallon (should I not include the actinic bulbs in that calculation?) and seems on the low side but I hear that WpG is a thing of the past and when using a better quality fixture that has a good quality reflector, more light makes it into the tank.

Is that enough or should I go with...

Option 2
Aquatic Life Light T5 HO 12-Lamp 6-Lunar Aquarium Light, 72-Inch
It's a 72" fixture with 12x39W T5HO, 6 LED moonlights and I'll be using the same combination of bulbs, just more of them of course. This works out to be 2.6 WpG (again I've included the actinic in that calculation). Ultimately I'd prefer to not spend the extra $250 if I don't need it but I want the plants to thrive as much as possible.

If you're curious, I'm not going to be using Co2 because of the PH drop so I'd like to attempt it without investing money in controllers to combat this and the Co2 system.

I'd appreciate your thoughts!


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