Curious About Kelvin Light

techen

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So my LFS was out of tropical white and so I thought I'd try marine light. Now this is like 3x's brighter than my tropical light and is 14,000 k worth.
 
Is this suitable for plants? It's more high on the blue scale but still covers reds,yellows and greens. As I wanted to replace my pink with white.
 
I will be interested to see what everyone has to say about this, as I was thinking of mixing a marine bulb with my tropical bulb. 
 
Kelvin describes the overall colour temperature of a light (think of a piece of iron being heated up, the hotter it gets the whiter it gets, starting out red. Hence the high numbers being whiter.
 
It's an estimation of the overall look and you'll need to look at the spectrogram (the colourful picture bit) to see where the bulb peaks to tell much about it's plant growth potential.
 
As is stands, most of our lights make predominantly blue and red light, which are the colours that chlorophyll prefers. Humans tend to view bluer lights as brighter, even if the total power being put out by the lights is lower. This can be useful, as it means that we accept weaker lights, which keeps algae down. 
 
14,000K tubes will grow plants, but generally they predominate in the higher end spectrums, losing some slight where the plants really want it, so we tend to suggest not going much past 10,000K tubes. 14,000's will grow plants, just not as well.
 
The next issue is the green. Plants don't use a huge amount of green light, it tends to be reflected, which means that green light will make the plants stand out better, but is not so good for growing.
 
As an example, here's a tropical tube
t5tropicalspec.jpg4dff27d744383.jpg

 
and here's a 14,000K
t514kwhitespec.jpg4dff280cb7da7.jpg
 
There seems to be more of an even spread between 600 and 700 in the tropical lights where is the marine light almost skips this.
 
So overall, Its possible that my pink tropical light would have a far great growth rate than the marine white light I believe.
 
This sort of picture probably helps as well.
 
chlorophyll_absorption_graph.jpg
 
I don't get what the last photo is ment to be for? XD
 
It's the frequencies that the chlorophyll can make the best use of.
 
It's worth noting that the graph is positive for all of the light, but there are obvious peaks.
 
SO overall, I'd be better off running pink and white tropical than two whites, one being a marine?
 

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