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Cheap T5 at my local hardware.

master3z

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18 Mar 2012
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There are cheap T5 tubes being sold at my local hardware.. Can these be use to grow aquarium plants?
 
master3z said:
There are cheap T5 tubes being sold at my local hardware.. Can these be use to grow aquarium plants?
Hi there. The answer to this is yes. Plants will grow with any light. The more light the more they grow (and require fertiliser and CO2 proportionately). The light spectrum is more a personal choice from an aesthetic aspect generally.
 
With time,does the lightning intensity decreases? i should replace the bulb later? if yes after how long?
 
Antipofish said:
master3z said:
There are cheap T5 tubes being sold at my local hardware.. Can these be use to grow aquarium plants?
Hi there. The answer to this is yes. Plants will grow with any light. The more light the more they grow (and require fertiliser and CO2 proportionately). The light spectrum is more a personal choice from an aesthetic aspect generally.


Hello so plants will grow with any light,they dont need to be 6500k is that correct
 
hixy said:
Antipofish said:
master3z said:
There are cheap T5 tubes being sold at my local hardware.. Can these be use to grow aquarium plants?
Hi there. The answer to this is yes. Plants will grow with any light. The more light the more they grow (and require fertiliser and CO2 proportionately). The light spectrum is more a personal choice from an aesthetic aspect generally.


Hello so plants will grow with any light,they dont need to be 6500k is that correct

Hi Hixy, yes mate that is correct :thumbup: You would probably want to avoid the spectrums about 10000k but the rest is really personal preference in terms of colour rendition in your tank with the plants and fish you have. This blog here is excellent reading. You don't even have to spend a fortune on aquatic tubes as our friendly LFS owners would have us all believe. Neither do you have to replace the tubes every 6 months !

http://www.theplantedtank.co.uk/lighting.htm
 
Antipofish said:
You would probably want to avoid the spectrums about 10000k
No, this is not true at all. There is no Kelvin temperature bulb you would want to avoid unless you don't like the color. 10,000K bulbs are excellent when used in combination with other colors which mitigate the possibly overwhelming look of blue/indigo produced by 10,000K bulbs, which are right up the alley of plant chlorophyll. This has been previously explained in the thread;
growlux bulbs

Cheers,
 
ceg4048 said:
Antipofish said:
You would probably want to avoid the spectrums about 10000k
No, this is not true at all. There is no Kelvin temperature bulb you would want to avoid unless you don't like the color. 10,000K bulbs are excellent when used in combination with other colors which mitigate the possibly overwhelming look of blue/indigo produced by 10,000K bulbs, which are right up the alley of plant chlorophyll. This has been previously explained in the thread;
growlux bulbs

Cheers,

TYPO ! I meant to say above 10,000k and should have qualified that by saying it is down to personal preference and that I find that above that level things appear to blue. Ceg is quite right that 10000k can be very useful in conjunction with other spectra.
 
Years ago, when just keeping fish (and a few plants) I tried a cheap general purpose T8 tube for my Juwel Vision 180, bought from local hardware store for couple of quid (£4 if I remember). This was to replace a failed Arcadia tube and didn't want to spend £15 odd.

However the cheap light, whilst bright, was a lot more yellow rather like a normal tungsten light bulb light.

Main issue was, within a couple of days/weeks after installing, algae everywhere. Previously never suffered any algae at all.

Didn't really click the change that cause the algae, however I mentioned this at local Maidenhead Aquatics who said "yes algae this is what I would expect from a tube like this".

Bought a £15 Arcadia tube (Freshwater tube?), much brighter white, fish & plants looked better and algae slowly went away.
 
Well I use yellow lights all the time and I don't get algae. It's amazing how people attribute cause and effect. When your algae went away did you the resume the yellow light to see if the algae returned? How can you tell the difference between causality and coincidence? Did you measure the PAR of the two bulbs? Without having control, or even knowing the relative intensities, how can you possibly attribute algal blooms to a color? I've heard arguments from every camp saying this color or that color causes algae. Most people think blue light causes algae. Marine folks swear that green and red causes algae.

Cheers,
 
Sorry one more question,when ever i go into local b&q i always look for daylights bulbs which they never have.They mainly have warm white bulbs with 3000k on them are these ok to use on planted aquariums,so if i understand a bulb is a bulb and plants will grow no matter what bulbs is used.
 
ceg4048 said:
Well I use yellow lights all the time and I don't get algae. It's amazing how people attribute cause and effect. When your algae went away did you the resume the yellow light to see if the algae returned? How can you tell the difference between causality and coibcidence? Did you measure the PAR of the two bulbs? Without having control, or even knowing the relative intensities, how can you possibly attribute algal blooms to a color? I've heard arguments from ebery camp saying this color or that color causes algae. Mosy people think blue light causes algae. Marine folks swear that green and red causes algae.

Cheers,

Hi Ceg,
if we presume the wattage of both types of bulb are equal, and although the colour rendition may not be important, could the change in light spectrum 'throw' the plants a little, much like a change in c02 thus resulting in a transition period in which the algae could temporarily win the battle? Or is changing light the same as changes in water perameters whereby the plants dont really care?
Cheers,
Ady.
 
i have a 60cm deep 3 feet tank.
It is a low tech aquarium atm.
I will go high tech soon because i want to gro carpet plants.
I want to use 24w normal t5 tubes. Will the 24w normal t5 tubes have enough power to reach the bottom of my tank to grow carpet plants?

How many 24w t5 tubes i will need ?
 
Ady34 said:
..if we presume the wattage of both types of bulb are equal, and although the colour rendition may not be important, could the change in light spectrum 'throw' the plants a little, much like a change in c02 thus resulting in a transition period in which the algae could temporarily win the battle? Or is changing light the same as changes in water perameters whereby the plants dont really care?
Hi Ady,
Well it's not necessarily about equal wattage, it's about equal PAR. Bulbs of similar wattage may in fact have different PAR and this will affect the plant more so than spectrum. When someone makes a comparison of growth using different bulbs it's important that they are comparing apples to apples, unless they are specifically comparing the differences in PAR for different bulb types. So if you want to compare the effects of yellow light versus red light, then you have to ensure that the PAR is the same for both, and that way you will be seeing differences due to spectrum and NOT due to intensity. This is where people make false connections. For example, I can grow plants with simple Tesco incandescent light bulbs, but incandescent bulbs have a very poor PAR efficiency. They emit mostly heat as infrared. Most of the spectrum is in the yellow. and so only about 12% of the energy output is useful PAR, so this makes incandescent bulbs generally inadequate if we want rapid growth rates, but again, that's because of PAR limitation, not because of the yellow spectrum of these bulbs. Fluorescent tubes have a higher PAR efficiency, perhaps on the order of 25%-30%, Halides emit higher still, perhaps 40%.

Yellow light simply gets processed by a pigment that is different than chlorophyll. This energy is then transferred to the chlorophyll. Pigments such as Phycocyanin process orange and red light, while a pigment such as Phycoerythrin processes blue-green to yellow. The plant simply analyzes the incident wavelengths and produces the pigments necessary to make use of the available colors. The energy absorbed by that pigment is then passed on to the chlorophyll, and the chlorophyll reacts in the same way as if it were excited by it's own native blue and red excitation wavelengths.

Plants have an arsenal of these auxiliary pigments to deal with any range of colors within the visible spectrum so they can't be "thrown off" just because your light is changed to yellowish or greenish. White light is composed of all colors, so the plant is already doing this conversion and already has these pigments in place. Since plants are descended from algae they have pretty much the same pigments as algae. Whatever light algae can use, plants can use. Whatever light plants can use, algae can use. The problem occurs in plants when you have too much PAR. That's when algae wins. They could each care less about colors. In fact, the main job of these pigments is to protect the plant from too much PAR, and they do this by filtering out and rejecting excess PAR and UV by fluorescing away the excess energy. This is what we see so often when plants "color up" in response to higher light intensity. The pigments become visible because they plant has to produce boatloads of them to deal with Klingon Photon Death Ray fanaticism. :thumbdown:

Cheers,
 
Conspiracy theory : Using 10000K bulbs would result in higher production of phycoerythrin which would make plants redder ????
 
master3z said:
i have a 60cm deep 3 feet tank.
It is a low tech aquarium atm.
I will go high tech soon because i want to gro carpet plants.
I want to use 24w normal t5 tubes. Will the 24w normal t5 tubes have enough power to reach the bottom of my tank to grow carpet plants?

How many 24w t5 tubes i will need ?


Need an answer to this.... anyone can help.. ?
 
Carpet plants do not really care about normal versus abnormal T5. They care about flow and CO2. You'd better think about that and stop worrying about whether you have enough light. Going high tech does not mean going high light. It means going high CO2, high flow and high nutrition. Lights should be at the very bottom of your list of concerns right now.

Mortis said:
Conspiracy theory : Using 10000K bulbs would result in higher production of phycoerythrin which would make plants redder ????
Very possibly. There are a lot of other factors as well though. And it also depends on the plant species. There are a boatload of blue eating pigments, including green chlorophyll, so a plant may not necessisarily use this particular protein. Give it a try mate and see what happens. :wave:

Cheers,
 
I think he means 10,000. Here is a color map of theoretical kelvin temperatures.If you follow the curved line in the middle of the color space you'll see what they are supposed to follow, but they never do. The Kelvin markers show the color where the marker intersects the curved line. if you look at a 20,000K bulb it is an awful party blue. A Tesco incandescent 60W light bulb would be about halfway between the 2000K and the 3000K marker. Normal daylight should be halfway between the 6000K and the 7000K marker.
Planckian-locus.png


Have a look at the thread viewtopic.php?f=50&t=555 to get an idea of some of the more popular bulb models if you don't like the look of your bulbs from the hardware store. I've been using the same bulbs found in almost every office building in the world (Osram 840) and these tend to have an orange cast. No big deal, just mix them with some other more bluish/greenish bulbs to get a nice mixed color.

Cheers,
 
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