Lighting for a 30x15x18

[StrontiumDog]

Aqua-Glo Fluor. Aquarium Lamp - 76.2cm has a wattage of 25w.

This is from the suppliers web site Hagen, and all of them are 25w, are there no bigger wattage ones. A this means i would need 4 of them for low- medium plants.

I need pointing in the right direction please.

 

[Aquascaper]

So your tank's about 25g?

I think it's 2w per gallon usually so you could get away with your 'standard' tube with a reflector to boost it to around 50w.
Best idea would be to get another tube and get reflectors for both

 

[fishy business]

You have about the same size tank as me, i was trying to find a high wattage bulb, dont think you can get them, so today i just added another light, so i have now to lights at 20w and a nice bit of foil to reflect all the light back in the tank. works quite well.
lee

 

[Aquascaper]

T8 tubes don't go higher than 38w (there's one @ 58w but it's a 60" tube). If you need more you need to look into getting a T5 setup which are smaller diameter tubes but more intense light (you need to change the ballasts to run T5's). The other option is metal halide lights (these are expensive ) and they range from 70w upto 250w (400w for a marine light) but need a pendant array to house them.
If you want to get silly you could get mercury vapour lamps which are either 80w or 125w and again need specialist arrays.

There is a new tube just out called the T5 Plant Pro by Arcadia which is meant to be quite effective, you could keep your existing tube and just buy a new T5 ballast and one of these tubes.

HTH

Arcadia

 

[joshua]

Those lights are normal flourescent tubes right?
I'm not too sure if its available over for you guys over there, but we have compact flourescent tubes over here. The tubes are like U shape whcih has been squashed so its effectively like 2 tubes. For me i'm using 36Watts PL(compact flourescnet) which is only 1.5ft long and the 55W one is 2 ft long. Just wondering if it's avialble for you guys too