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Choosing Aquarium Lights - Part 1 - Your Fish and the Color of the Light By Len Loman
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Thursday, March 19, 2009 |
This article is part of a three-part series on the lights in the aquarium, be sure to read the entire series!
Choose the proper aquarium lighting is very different from the lighting of your home. At home, you probably just buy a bulb that fits the schedules, put in place, and go their way. Your options are greater between the lights and lamps and traditional incandescent bulbs and compact fluorescent.
If you own an aquarium, however, the lighting becomes more important. After all, if you keep animals in an aquarium, you are responsible for providing a healthy environment that closely mimics their natural habitat. To do this successfully, you need a few pieces of information.
What's in your aquarium?
The first step in the choice of lights is knowing what kind of animals and plants that will remain in your tank. For the purposes of this article focuses on the care and maintenance of fish.
• Freshwater fish: They are common to freshwater fish from lakes and rivers and are often referred to as "tropical fish." Freshwater fish including goldfish, Guppi, swordtails and cichlids. Fresh water tanks can also include plants that grow in freshwater.
• Saltwater Fish: These are fish and animals found in the ocean. That require the owner to prepare a salt water solution that replicates ocean water as closely as possible. Popular saltwater fish are damsel fish, clown fish, Triggerfish, pufferfish, sharks, and more. Other "animals" includes salt water tanks at sea stars, anemones, sea cucumbers, worms, and fan.
• Brackish water: Fish that live in freshwater and saltwater sources are said to perform live in brackish water. The brackish water in a tank is less salty than the one used for saltwater fish. Mollys are among the most popular brackish water fish. In general, the lighting requirements for a salt water aquarium are the same as for a freshwater aquarium. • coral tanks: These tanks of salt water that covers more than just fish, such as living coral, live rock, living sand, etc.
What color is your light?
Usually think of light as colorless. But consider what happens when light shines through a prism. The rainbow that results is that the common view has been split into its different wavelengths of color. Without a prism, the different wavelengths of color are very hard to distinguish the eyes, but they are there. The color of light is expressed as the Kelvin scale, which measures the temperature of light.
Here is a brief description of the various lighting options.
• Lights rated at 5500K and below are typically incandescent bulbs in the red / yellow wavelength. These are not good options for the lights in the aquarium, and to promote the excessive growth of algae. Natural light is also to be avoided for this reason.
• 6500K lights are lights on the green / yellow wavelengths. Which are suitable for freshwater tanks that are somewhat shallow (these lights are not good in deep water penetration) as a supplement to water tanks or saltwater reef using actinic light (more of which later), and live plants.
• 10000K lamps produce white light with a light blue cast. This is a good choice for most tanks, including tanks of freshwater and saltwater, reefs, and especially the tanks and reservoirs of deep water fish and plants. This type of light really shows the beauty of animals and plants at their best.
• 12000K to 20000K lamps produce very intense white light with a more bluish cast. These lights are the best when the tank is deep, or that has fish that are native to very deep water.
• Actinic light is not rated on the Kelvin scale. The numbers you see in actinic bulbs are 420nm or 460nm, which are nanometer measurements. Think of the actinic light as in the upper end of the blue spectrum of the ultraviolet spectrum that we can not see completely. The use of light as actinic light aquarium is still undecided. They are most suitable for reef tanks, and are often used in combination with other lamps to provide light that more closely represents the full spectrum of natural light.
• Lunar moon or lights, usually produces a blue light that was not much lighting, but the lights white spots of light play a full moon. These LED lights and are usually be used in any type of deposit, but are most useful when you need to simulate the lunar cycles to breed fish.
Different colors of lights work best for different purposes. For example, a light that is in the spectrum of yellow-green is good for the growth of living plants. Salt-water aquarium and often of the blue light spectrum. Toward the red spectrum, a light begins to produce more heat than light, think of the infrared light you see in the fries at a fast food restaurant.
When choosing lights aquarium then know what kind of fish, animals and plants will be keeping will help you know what color of light to buy.
Author-Len Loman
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posted by neptunus @ 6:25 PM
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