sponge........not sure for fresh water but i know the rule of thumb for salt lighting is to start looking for new bulbs at the 5 month mark and replace them at 6 months............also i can't say for sure but flouresents should be {and never are, lol} stored flat and should be rotated in a stock room situation......every LFS I've ever seen has the bulbs standing in a display on end........this could degrade the life of the bulbs some...so the amount oftime on the shelf could effect the quality of the light as well...............like we need something else to worry about right? lol sorry just passing on info........good luck with the brown stuff
why would you use acnic lighting on a freshwater tank... the plants can't photosenthesize that light spectrum... nothing benifits from it in a FW tank... stop using 50/50 and actnic light setups people...
i had no choice... the lighting sold to me was 50/50 and i didnt know better at the time... but i kinda like the color now :) I haven't heard of anything negative coming from the use of actinics, aside from cost. I doubt my brown algae is from my actinic...
but the thing is that you're only using half of the lighting... i would get two 6700k bulbs instead of the 10,000k and actnic... that way say the fixture is 64W in total... you could actually have 64W of benificial lighting instead of 32W... and if you have plants, the 10,000k spectrum lighting does nothing to plants... it would be like having a 20W bulb in there... and that's why you don't get green algae... usually if the tank is matured the brown algae goes away...
say on one of my 100g tanks i only have one 40W flourecent bulb... after a couple of months i started to get green algae... i tripped out because it was low wattage... but then i found out that these GE bulbs are at 6700K spectrum... and for $3 each you can't beat that...
