I'm new to reef tanks (just got a 75G reef ready oceanic and stand, now researching lights). I've come accross this article, and was wondering what the opinion of others are. Is it true that one can use these general purpose bulbs? Anyone doing it? (or, if one believes the author, the real question is why isn't everyone doing it!).
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The lighting system for a reef aquarium is one of the most expensive pieces of equipment you will have to purchase. There are a number of ways to save on the initial cost, but up to now, there has been no way to save on the high cost of replacement bulbs. All that is changed. Read on, dear reader, and I will try to keep some green in your wallet and blue-white over your reef tank. You will save money and keep your corals under the best light possible.
But, before I go on to explain how to save on replacement bulbs, let me just review some other ways to save on lighting, and some ways not to. First, if you know enough to follow a simple wiring diagram, you can cut costs by assembling your own light hood rather than buying a ready-made one. But, if you try to save money further by buying cheaper components, such as old-style non-electronic ballasts, for example, you will only end up paying more all around.
You will pay more for electricity to power the system because conventional ballasts use at least 30% more electricity, and usually more. You will pay more for replacement bulbs because non-electronic and even some cheaper electronic ballasts wear out the bulbs faster in a number of ways: they blacken the ends of the lamps which diminishes the light output and makes the bulbs burn out more quickly, and they make the bulbs shift their spectrums much more quickly, necessitating a replacement.
Non-electronic ballasts and some of the cheaper electronic ballasts using older designs run much hotter than the newer ones, causing your house, and your aquarium (if you place your ballast under your tank) to heat up more. And the cheaper ballasts, in my experience, do not last as long.
With older VHO ballasts, for example, the standard operating procedure was to replace the bulbs (or lamps, more properly) every six months. At $25.00 to $35.00 a bulb, this could add significantly to one's yearly aquarium expenses. Some of the newer ballasts do not have to have their bulbs replaced for at least a year. But the best lamp drivers do much, much better. They run VHO bulbs without any noticeable shift in color and with negligible loss of illumination over three, four, or even more years.
For example, I ran the same 75-watt, 24" VHO lamps over my 25-gallon reef aquarium for about three years with no appreciable loss of brightness or color rendering. I had no hair algae, all my corals grew and grew, and the only "problems" I had with the lighting were that I constantly had to prune my corals back, and I didn't get to use the fan I installed because the ballast and the bulbs don't get hot enough to heat the water or anything else. The Ice Cap ballast was barely warm to the touch. I would still be running them but I needed longer bulbs when I moved all the tank's inhabitants to a new aquarium. But still I would have to replace those bulbs some day and, to do so, is costly because VHO bulbs are not cheap when you have, say, four to buy.
This is where the new way to save money comes in: I had been hearing some rumors about the use of certain wide spectrum standard watt bulbs lit with Ice Cap VHO ballasts (lamp drivers, more properly) getting color rendering and light intensities similar to that of VHO bulbs. It didn't seem possible on two counts: First, everyone "knows" that even if the color rendering were the same, standard watt bulbs cannot be as bright as VHO watt bulbs. Second, everyone "knows" that VHO ballasts cannot light standard lamps without burning them out quickly.
On the other hand, I had read some years ago that, if Alexander Graham Bell "knew" anything about electricity, he would never have invented the telephone. Back then everyone "knew" that electric wires could not carry human voices.
So I began to find out. I spoke to the folks at Sunseekers ballasts. They told me they felt their ballasts would not safely light a standard bulb. At Hamilton, they told me that their bulbs could light regular watt bulb but, instead of getting ten to twelve months of light, one could only expect about six months of illumination before burn-out. Both Sunseekers and Hamilton systems come with conventional ballasts.
It seemed hopeless. Then, I started to get a ray or two of fluorescent sunlight. "Paul," the tech guy at Energy Savers, told me his VHO ballasts would light standard bulbs, but that they had never run any tests to see if the lamps would produce more intensity or a premature burn-out. So at least there, the jury was still out.
Finally, I spoke to the folks at Ice Cap and they told me that not only were their ballasts capable of lighting wide spectrum, standard watt bulbs, but that they had also heard similar stories about the "miraculous" performance of standard bulbs and were actually conducting tests on various bulbs, standard, VHO, and power compact, and were astounded at the results themselves. They had tried the GE "Sunshine" bulbs (GE 5K T-12 40-watt full spectrum) and the GE "Daylight Ultra" bulbs (GE 6.5K 40-watt Daylight Ultra) and, later, at my suggestion, the Philips X40DX (Daylight extra) bulbs. They were getting such outstanding readings, they ran the tests two times just to confirm the results.
They were kind enough to share their test readings with me and I am now sharing them with you. As you can see from the charts, the GE "Sunshine" bulbs, and even more so, the GE "Daylight Ultra" and Philips X40DX bulbs have very similar spectrums as the Triton 50. Lumichrome 6.5K and the power compact National FPR961EX-D/A 67K.
The big difference is price. The GE "Sunshine" bulbs, GE "Daylight Ultra," and the Philips X40DX bulbs are all available commercially at such retail outlets as Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Home Depot for about five dollars each for the four-foot, 40-watt size.
But here is the astounding part: with either the Ice Cap 430 or 660 ballast (the latter produces about 20% more light output with these bulbs), the light intensity is about the same as the VHO bulbs! This means you may well be able to use a five-dollar bulb instead of a twenty-five or thirty-dollar bulb, without sacrificing a thing.
I have previously reported that even after many years of use, bulbs do not seem to lose much in the way of intensity or color shift with such electronic ballasts as the Ice Cap 430 and 660, when using VHO lamps. Will the same hold true of standard bulbs? In other words, will, say a 30-watt 36" lamp or a 40-watt 48" give me as intense illumination and color rendering after a year or two, as it does after the first hundred hours? The jury is still out on that one, as I have not been using my 40-watt bulbs in my own home unit that long. But so far, after a few months, the light intensities are not diminished and all my corals are still flourishing.
But, even if they do burn out in half the expected life of 20,000 hours, that's still over three years of lighting out of a five-dollar bulb! Even if my corals start to close up, or slow their growth after only one year, or even six months (which I don't think they will), I'm still saving a considerable amount of money.
In my experimental aquarium, I am running two GE bulbs and two Philips 40-watt bulbs with an Ice Cap 660 driver. The 660 is delivering about 80 watts of energy in the bulb. Even with twice the wattage going through the bulb, this should not burn out the lamp prematurely or cause a shift in color rendering, because the electronic ballast does not light a lamp the way a conventional ballast does.
The conventional magnetic ballast creates an electrical arc, a sort of super hot spark, if you will, that creates a situation in which the tiny bit of mercury in the bulb is vaporized and excited electrons send out radiant energy that, in turn, cause the phosphorescent coatings on the inside of the glass tube to glow. Since in the old-style, non-electronic ballasts the electromagnet is turned on and off by the electrical current sixty times each second, the fluorescent bulb flickers on and off sixty times each second. The electronic ballast, on the other hand, makes the phosphorescent coatings glow by direct ionization. That is, it creates an electrical charge that causes the electrons to radiate and create the glow. The end result, essentially, is that the "on-off" cycle is much, much more rapid (27,000 times per second, actually) and, therefore, much more "soft." The bulbs do not flicker with the alternating current and the bulbs in such a system are subjected to less harsh treatment. They do not lose intensity or color with anywhere near the quickness of bulbs lit by conventional ballasts.
Take at look at the chart showing the color rendering of the GE 6.5 watt bulb. This is a true triphosphor bulb, by the way, as is the Philips DX, though neither company advertises them as such. The Philips bulb does not seem to have as full a spectrum as the other bulbs, trailing off as it does in the bluer end of the spectrum. But it is still a bulb with much good illumination to offer the reef tank from about 300 Nanometers to about 650.
Now look at the chart on the GE 6.5K bulb. Notice how closely it matches the wavelengths of the power compact bulb (the National FPR96EX-D/A BIAX 67K) and the Triton 50 (F32T8).
The GE 5K bulb (5K T12 full spectrum) has spikes a little shifted toward the red side, but it still covers the same spectrum quite well.
In other words, the charts indicate a pretty close color rendering for the inexpensive 40-watt lamps. But the charts do not indicate the intensity of the light, nor the amount of light output. For this we need a light meter.
To take an accurate reading, I turned on the fluorescent lights to be tested and let them run for 100 hours. This is because any fluorescent lamp will lose in the first 100 hours as much intensity and color (10%) as it will in the next thousand hours. All color renderings and light intensities you see on the wrapping any fluorescent bulb comes in are always taken after 100 hours. That is when you should take your color intensity readings for future reference, if you're using a light meter.
For fluorescent bulbs, it does not matter how many times they are turned on and off in that 100 hours, as that will not affect the bulb's performance. For metal halide bulbs, the story is very different. Metal halides are very much affected by being turned on and off. Each cycle ages the bulb, changes its color reading and intensity, and sends it just that much closer to the end of its effective life.
After the burn-in period, the intensity of the light measured was extraordinarily high, almost identical to the intensity of the readings I got for the VHO bulbs! So why use VHO bulbs, then, if you can get the same results with ordinary bulbs and can save a lot of money initially and continually?
So what would be the cost of my new lighting system for my 65-gallon reef tank? About $175.00 for the Ice Cap 660, about $48.00 for the endcaps for four bulbs, and only $20.00 for all four bulbs, for a total of $243.00. Plus, I'm running 320 watts of electricity instead of 440 watts, and the cost of my replacement bulbs is negligible, namely $20.00 every four years or so.
As usual, if you have any comments, or complaints, or want more information, you can write me in care of FAMA, or email me: [email protected]. I will get back to you. Take care of yourself and your pets.
©Copyright, FAMA. All rights reserved.
__________________________
The lighting system for a reef aquarium is one of the most expensive pieces of equipment you will have to purchase. There are a number of ways to save on the initial cost, but up to now, there has been no way to save on the high cost of replacement bulbs. All that is changed. Read on, dear reader, and I will try to keep some green in your wallet and blue-white over your reef tank. You will save money and keep your corals under the best light possible.
But, before I go on to explain how to save on replacement bulbs, let me just review some other ways to save on lighting, and some ways not to. First, if you know enough to follow a simple wiring diagram, you can cut costs by assembling your own light hood rather than buying a ready-made one. But, if you try to save money further by buying cheaper components, such as old-style non-electronic ballasts, for example, you will only end up paying more all around.
You will pay more for electricity to power the system because conventional ballasts use at least 30% more electricity, and usually more. You will pay more for replacement bulbs because non-electronic and even some cheaper electronic ballasts wear out the bulbs faster in a number of ways: they blacken the ends of the lamps which diminishes the light output and makes the bulbs burn out more quickly, and they make the bulbs shift their spectrums much more quickly, necessitating a replacement.
Non-electronic ballasts and some of the cheaper electronic ballasts using older designs run much hotter than the newer ones, causing your house, and your aquarium (if you place your ballast under your tank) to heat up more. And the cheaper ballasts, in my experience, do not last as long.
With older VHO ballasts, for example, the standard operating procedure was to replace the bulbs (or lamps, more properly) every six months. At $25.00 to $35.00 a bulb, this could add significantly to one's yearly aquarium expenses. Some of the newer ballasts do not have to have their bulbs replaced for at least a year. But the best lamp drivers do much, much better. They run VHO bulbs without any noticeable shift in color and with negligible loss of illumination over three, four, or even more years.
For example, I ran the same 75-watt, 24" VHO lamps over my 25-gallon reef aquarium for about three years with no appreciable loss of brightness or color rendering. I had no hair algae, all my corals grew and grew, and the only "problems" I had with the lighting were that I constantly had to prune my corals back, and I didn't get to use the fan I installed because the ballast and the bulbs don't get hot enough to heat the water or anything else. The Ice Cap ballast was barely warm to the touch. I would still be running them but I needed longer bulbs when I moved all the tank's inhabitants to a new aquarium. But still I would have to replace those bulbs some day and, to do so, is costly because VHO bulbs are not cheap when you have, say, four to buy.
This is where the new way to save money comes in: I had been hearing some rumors about the use of certain wide spectrum standard watt bulbs lit with Ice Cap VHO ballasts (lamp drivers, more properly) getting color rendering and light intensities similar to that of VHO bulbs. It didn't seem possible on two counts: First, everyone "knows" that even if the color rendering were the same, standard watt bulbs cannot be as bright as VHO watt bulbs. Second, everyone "knows" that VHO ballasts cannot light standard lamps without burning them out quickly.
On the other hand, I had read some years ago that, if Alexander Graham Bell "knew" anything about electricity, he would never have invented the telephone. Back then everyone "knew" that electric wires could not carry human voices.
So I began to find out. I spoke to the folks at Sunseekers ballasts. They told me they felt their ballasts would not safely light a standard bulb. At Hamilton, they told me that their bulbs could light regular watt bulb but, instead of getting ten to twelve months of light, one could only expect about six months of illumination before burn-out. Both Sunseekers and Hamilton systems come with conventional ballasts.
It seemed hopeless. Then, I started to get a ray or two of fluorescent sunlight. "Paul," the tech guy at Energy Savers, told me his VHO ballasts would light standard bulbs, but that they had never run any tests to see if the lamps would produce more intensity or a premature burn-out. So at least there, the jury was still out.
Finally, I spoke to the folks at Ice Cap and they told me that not only were their ballasts capable of lighting wide spectrum, standard watt bulbs, but that they had also heard similar stories about the "miraculous" performance of standard bulbs and were actually conducting tests on various bulbs, standard, VHO, and power compact, and were astounded at the results themselves. They had tried the GE "Sunshine" bulbs (GE 5K T-12 40-watt full spectrum) and the GE "Daylight Ultra" bulbs (GE 6.5K 40-watt Daylight Ultra) and, later, at my suggestion, the Philips X40DX (Daylight extra) bulbs. They were getting such outstanding readings, they ran the tests two times just to confirm the results.
They were kind enough to share their test readings with me and I am now sharing them with you. As you can see from the charts, the GE "Sunshine" bulbs, and even more so, the GE "Daylight Ultra" and Philips X40DX bulbs have very similar spectrums as the Triton 50. Lumichrome 6.5K and the power compact National FPR961EX-D/A 67K.
The big difference is price. The GE "Sunshine" bulbs, GE "Daylight Ultra," and the Philips X40DX bulbs are all available commercially at such retail outlets as Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Home Depot for about five dollars each for the four-foot, 40-watt size.
But here is the astounding part: with either the Ice Cap 430 or 660 ballast (the latter produces about 20% more light output with these bulbs), the light intensity is about the same as the VHO bulbs! This means you may well be able to use a five-dollar bulb instead of a twenty-five or thirty-dollar bulb, without sacrificing a thing.
I have previously reported that even after many years of use, bulbs do not seem to lose much in the way of intensity or color shift with such electronic ballasts as the Ice Cap 430 and 660, when using VHO lamps. Will the same hold true of standard bulbs? In other words, will, say a 30-watt 36" lamp or a 40-watt 48" give me as intense illumination and color rendering after a year or two, as it does after the first hundred hours? The jury is still out on that one, as I have not been using my 40-watt bulbs in my own home unit that long. But so far, after a few months, the light intensities are not diminished and all my corals are still flourishing.
But, even if they do burn out in half the expected life of 20,000 hours, that's still over three years of lighting out of a five-dollar bulb! Even if my corals start to close up, or slow their growth after only one year, or even six months (which I don't think they will), I'm still saving a considerable amount of money.
In my experimental aquarium, I am running two GE bulbs and two Philips 40-watt bulbs with an Ice Cap 660 driver. The 660 is delivering about 80 watts of energy in the bulb. Even with twice the wattage going through the bulb, this should not burn out the lamp prematurely or cause a shift in color rendering, because the electronic ballast does not light a lamp the way a conventional ballast does.
The conventional magnetic ballast creates an electrical arc, a sort of super hot spark, if you will, that creates a situation in which the tiny bit of mercury in the bulb is vaporized and excited electrons send out radiant energy that, in turn, cause the phosphorescent coatings on the inside of the glass tube to glow. Since in the old-style, non-electronic ballasts the electromagnet is turned on and off by the electrical current sixty times each second, the fluorescent bulb flickers on and off sixty times each second. The electronic ballast, on the other hand, makes the phosphorescent coatings glow by direct ionization. That is, it creates an electrical charge that causes the electrons to radiate and create the glow. The end result, essentially, is that the "on-off" cycle is much, much more rapid (27,000 times per second, actually) and, therefore, much more "soft." The bulbs do not flicker with the alternating current and the bulbs in such a system are subjected to less harsh treatment. They do not lose intensity or color with anywhere near the quickness of bulbs lit by conventional ballasts.
Take at look at the chart showing the color rendering of the GE 6.5 watt bulb. This is a true triphosphor bulb, by the way, as is the Philips DX, though neither company advertises them as such. The Philips bulb does not seem to have as full a spectrum as the other bulbs, trailing off as it does in the bluer end of the spectrum. But it is still a bulb with much good illumination to offer the reef tank from about 300 Nanometers to about 650.
Now look at the chart on the GE 6.5K bulb. Notice how closely it matches the wavelengths of the power compact bulb (the National FPR96EX-D/A BIAX 67K) and the Triton 50 (F32T8).
The GE 5K bulb (5K T12 full spectrum) has spikes a little shifted toward the red side, but it still covers the same spectrum quite well.
In other words, the charts indicate a pretty close color rendering for the inexpensive 40-watt lamps. But the charts do not indicate the intensity of the light, nor the amount of light output. For this we need a light meter.
To take an accurate reading, I turned on the fluorescent lights to be tested and let them run for 100 hours. This is because any fluorescent lamp will lose in the first 100 hours as much intensity and color (10%) as it will in the next thousand hours. All color renderings and light intensities you see on the wrapping any fluorescent bulb comes in are always taken after 100 hours. That is when you should take your color intensity readings for future reference, if you're using a light meter.
For fluorescent bulbs, it does not matter how many times they are turned on and off in that 100 hours, as that will not affect the bulb's performance. For metal halide bulbs, the story is very different. Metal halides are very much affected by being turned on and off. Each cycle ages the bulb, changes its color reading and intensity, and sends it just that much closer to the end of its effective life.
After the burn-in period, the intensity of the light measured was extraordinarily high, almost identical to the intensity of the readings I got for the VHO bulbs! So why use VHO bulbs, then, if you can get the same results with ordinary bulbs and can save a lot of money initially and continually?
So what would be the cost of my new lighting system for my 65-gallon reef tank? About $175.00 for the Ice Cap 660, about $48.00 for the endcaps for four bulbs, and only $20.00 for all four bulbs, for a total of $243.00. Plus, I'm running 320 watts of electricity instead of 440 watts, and the cost of my replacement bulbs is negligible, namely $20.00 every four years or so.
As usual, if you have any comments, or complaints, or want more information, you can write me in care of FAMA, or email me: [email protected]. I will get back to you. Take care of yourself and your pets.
©Copyright, FAMA. All rights reserved.
