so confused about lighting...i ned help with my lighting

[uroplatus]

hello. today i went to home depot and bought a 4ft shoplight fixture, it holds 2-40watt 48" T8 bulbs. I bought it but I didn't know about the bulb requirements, so I bought 2 48" homedepot plant and aquarium bulbs, these were T12. needless to say, they didn't fit, and they didn't have any T8 plant and aquaium bulbs, so I returned it all and got my money back. I couldn't get a fixture that held 2 -48"T12 bulbs because the ones they had had to be hardwired to the electrical system of the house, I wanted a fixure that you could simply plug into an outlet, but all of those held T8s only.
I looked around for inexpensive T8 48" bulbs and found a few, one of them was ZoomedTropic Sun, it was like $8something for 48"T8. Just what I need. Now, the fixture holds 2 of these 48" T8s. The light bulbs that are going in will be ZooMed Tropic Sun 48", it sais they are 5,500K each. My question is, will this work for 3-10g tanks and 1-20ghigh tank? I want to put lots of plants in the tank to make the shy fish I have in there feel safe and spawn for me. These are freshwater tanks by the way. Would this be too much lighting if I'm going to be keeping easy to care for low light needing plants, like javamoss, hornwort, and other easy to care for plants. Is it possible to have too much lighting? Thanks a lot.

 

[aspen]

too much lighting produces too much algae. if those 2 lamps fit right across those tanks, then you are doing fine. if they seem to produce algae, hang the fixture higher.

electrical suppliers (check yellow pages under electrical suppplies- wholesale) will have a wide variety of t-8 lamps, more than your home depot. i like to use phillips 850's. they work pretty good, but they are a little white looking.

rick

 

[M0oN]

Sounds good to me, easy algae fix is just throw'n a bristlenose pleco or some otocinclus in there, if you're planting the tank get fast growing plants to outcompete the algae, don't bother with oto's if you aren't going to plant the tank, they don't do too good without em'...

 

[uroplatus]

got it, it's not too much lighting, but if i get an algae problem...i'll just throw some algae eaters in there...thanks.