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Enough light?

LMuhlen

Member
Joined
23 Mar 2022
Messages
310
Location
Brazil
Hello,

I have a 325L tank, 1,3 x 0,5 x 0,5m, and I use two Finnex Planted+ ALC 24", both aligned to light up the whole length of the tank. The idea was to use a single 48" one, but they wouldn't deliver it where I am.

This tank is running for almost 2 years now, and despite my best efforts, it never flourished as expected, plants seem to be unhappy. I changed and tweeked and improved about everything since I set it up, and I got some results, but it still isn't what I expected.

At some point, I wasn't sure if I had too much light or not enough. Some slower plants like bolbitis and Anubias would grow better when shaded, while more demanding plants would wither.

I tried running at 50% power for a few months, no improvement. Now I'm running close to 100%, only the green LEDs are dimmed down a bit. The lights are very close to the water surface.

The lamp only accepts programs every 3 hours, so it is set as a 3h ramp up, 6h plateau and 3h ramp down, totalling 12h of non darkness. The room where the tank is at receives a lot of indirect day light.

I understand light is but one part of the full complexity of planted tanks, but what do you think, is it ok or not enough? The idea is to grow most plants, but not necessarily the trickiest ones.
 
Link to the manufacturer:
 
Here are the par data for the Finnex lights. The 48" is almost twice as powerful as the 24". So it's not just a longer version of the 24"


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Yes, but I'm using 2 of the 24" . This gets it close to a single 48". The 48" does have 10% more LED clusters than my setup, but now I see that it has 50% more power. Is it possible that they push the LEDs further with the longer version? That I hadn't noticed before.

When I bought the lamps, I assumed that the PAR readings could be doubled with two lamps, but now I see that it may have been a mistake since they are not directly illuminating the same region...

So does that mean that my light is too weak for my tank?
 
Yeah, that chart suggests that the light in the tank is pretty low, especially since those measurements are directly under the light and your tank is fairly wide, so it's going to be a lot less towards the back and front edge. Low light plants will be totally fine, but if you want to try others you should probably upgrade.
 
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