Lighting ... or Correct Me if I am Wrong
I have been looking at the compact fluorescent lighting available
(e.g.,from all-glass: www.all-glass.com) to replace my current standard fluorescent setup. Now correct me if I am wrong, but it looks to me that if you have a 48" tank, for example, and you have two 55 Watt compact fluorescent bulbs -- one on each side of the divider -- then the combined wattage (110 wattage) is not really what the plants are getting. Instead, it seems, that each side of the tank will receive approximately 55 watts + some small additional wattage indirectly from the other side of the tank. This seems to be less than my current setup where I have two 48" 40 watt bulbs. Here both lights are on each side of the tank and, given an even distribution of 40 watts eminating from the bulbs, each side would receive a total of 80 watts; arguably higher than the compact light alternative. Is this scenario incorrect in some way or does it make sense ? |
Lighting ... or Correct Me if I am Wrong
Homie wrote:
I have been looking at the compact fluorescent lighting available (e.g.,from all-glass: www.all-glass.com) to replace my current standard fluorescent setup. Now correct me if I am wrong, but it looks to me that if you have a 48" tank, for example, and you have two 55 Watt compact fluorescent bulbs -- one on each side of the divider -- then the combined wattage (110 wattage) is not really what the plants are getting. Instead, it seems, that each side of the tank will receive approximately 55 watts + some small additional wattage indirectly from the other side of the tank. This seems to be less than my current setup where I have two 48" 40 watt bulbs. Here both lights are on each side of the tank and, given an even distribution of 40 watts eminating from the bulbs, each side would receive a total of 80 watts; arguably higher than the compact light alternative. Is this scenario incorrect in some way or does it make sense ? The below is assuming that you're 2 x 40 look something like http://www.all-glass.com/products/ho...intube_img.gif (or two single strip 40 watt bulbs). I think you may be looking at the 40 Watts bulbs wrong. The way I see it is that a 40 watt bulb is 40 watts over the entire thing so the left has 20 watts and the right has 20 watts. So basically with two bulbs, the left and right halves are getting only 40 watts each. This new compact light will increase it to 55 per each side. (And if you want to get all technical, I think that you lose even more light with your two 40s since, again, I'm assuming here, that your 55G tank has a divider in the middle which is removing that width of light from the bulbs. Assuming that the divider is 2 inches wide, it's 4% of your 48 inch bulb. 4% of 40 watts is 1.6 watts x 2 bulbs = 3.2 watts lost because of the divider. So in theory, you lost a couple of watts on the divider alone on a 48 inch strip light.) Rambling helps with boredom at work! :-) -Ben |
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