light for lightly planted 55 gal.
 

Hi All,
I'm thinking about lighting for my new 55 gallon tank, not yet set up. I am
a relative newbie, with a long commute and two kids, upgrading from a 10
gallon tank. The point about the commute and the kids is I would like to
have a small to medium amount of live plants in my tank but not spend too
much time maintaining or replacing them (the plants, not the kids), and I
would of course like to avoid algae problems. I've been reading up so I'm
familiar with the more hearty plant species and will stick to those.

Anyway, my tank is an All-Glass and I'm leaning toward 2x24" twin-tube Versa
tops (the glass ones) with a basic 48" flourescent twin-tube strip light.
My questions:

1. Does this sound like a reasonable setup for a relatively lightly planted
tank?

2. If I decided to have only a few plants, might this even be too much
light?

3. What bulbs might one recommend? I know there are dozens of options out
there and I've been reading up, but would like to get opinions here as well.

Thanks for any input,
Howard

light for lightly planted 55 gal.
 

On Sat, 18 Jan 2003 04:58:13 GMT, "HDH" wrote:

2. If I decided to have only a few plants, might this even be too much
light?


no. Even if you only put in one plant, it still needs decent light
levels. Except for plants blocking the light, the number of plants
doesn't effect the needed light levels. If a plant needs medium
light, it needs medium light regardless of how many plants you add.

A twin tube setup would be the minimum required, and won't cause algae
problems if other conditions are good.


Chuck Gadd
http://www.csd.net/~cgadd/aqua