okay... so my canopy is going to have 260w of power compacts... wait... what's 65 times 4... all right so i'm right...
i have two 10,000k coralife bulbs, and two true acnic bulbs... but... i want to add a MH bulb in there...
since i'm tight and stuff... i'm going the whole DIY route...
i'm going to use a 250w mercury vapor ballast with a 250w 6,500k iwaski bulb... or however you spell it....
my question is... would you keep the PC lights as a 50/50 daylight/actnic setup, or go with 50/50 actnic/actnic combo...??? you know... the pink acnic and the blue acnic...
I used that same DIY MH setup 4 years ago on my first tank but I didn't have any actinic supplementation. The Iwasaki 6500 is very yellow so I would suggest using all 460nm actinic bulbs for supplement.
I am now using 2- 250w Reeflux 12000k MH's and started out using 1 420nm Geisseman Pure Actinic and 1 460nm Geisseman Actinic+ for supplements and the 420nm had a lot of purple in it and it didn't give a nice florescence to the corals like the very blue 460nm. I switched out the purple 420 and now use all 460nm "blue" blues and it makes the coral look awesome.
shnaps... i think i rated your tank a 10 a couple of days ago... that is esacly how i plan to make my 90g reef to be... like a trench of coral... a marvel...
anyways... yeah that's the same DIY i was looking at... hmm... i might spend the cash and get two 250w MH bulbs and get coil style metal halide ballast... i didn't know they were that cheap... on ebay they're almost giving them away...
anyways... thx for the input and you have a great tank...
yeah... that's what i'm thinking about doing... the PC have a ballast for each bulb... so i allready have to think about putting 4 pc ballast somewhere... i'm thinking about screwing them in the back of a piece of wood, and then screwing that onto the back of the canopy... jeez what a mess... even the LED's have small ballast... and the fans... sigh...
i fear that my stand or whatever is going to look alot worst... since it's really small for a 90 tank... i hate it... i can't stuff a big wet/dry down there either...
it's 3' long and 2' deep... well the tank is anyways... so the stand is a bit smaller... so everything is all bunched up in that small stand... so i have to build something to put everything else into...
plus... my protein skimmer came out to be 48" tall... so that's going behind the fish tank by itself... the good thing is that the tank is going in a corner and not flush against the wall... so i have the space... but to adjust and everything else is going to be insainly difficult in the future... oh well...
