It's time to replace the bulbs in my light fixture.
Currently, I'd been using the bulbs that came with it (one 12000k 65w full spectrum and one 65w actinic), and today I noticed that the tank looked a bit 'yellow'.
Being groggy, as I'd just stumbled out of bed, my first thought was, "How'd the water get that dirty? I just did a partial change? The water has never been
yellow before" and as I was finishing up another partial change, the blue flickered back on.
Effing actinic bulb is going.
Locally, I have about one option for compact fluorescent bulbs. PetCo has a Coralife 50/50 4 pin that I THINK will fit.
What I'm really curious about, however, is what those of you who have compact fluorescent lighting recommend for bulbs.
The fixture is an Odyssea (not the MH hood that seems to have the problem of starting on fire.
) and the bulbs are 24".
I'd like to stay at at least 12000k for the white light, though I'd not object to higher. When I had regular old fluorescent, I had 20000k bulbs; the FW tanks still have those. I do like that level of light for the plants in those tanks, but haven't found anything similar in the compact fluorescent realm.
I'm also curious as to what the opinion is of mixed 50/50 compact fluorescent bulbs; would pairing those up be any better than one white and one actinic?
As much as I hate to sound dense, this is the first time I have to actually buy a new set of bulbs for this fixture, and I have no idea what I'm doing.
Edited to add:
Currently, I'm looking at replacing the bulbs with a SunPaq Dual Daylight
6700ēK/10000ēK and a SunPaq Dual Actinic 420/460nm.
The aquarium itself is a 42 gallon pain-in-the...hex tank. It's got close to 50lb of live rock, a few snails and hermit crabs, two blue devil damsels, one yellowtail damsel, one domino damsel, a lawnmower blenny and a
maroon clownfish.
There's also a single
green hairy mushroom, a tuft of turtle grass and a codium taylori plant.
Pros?
Cons?
Am I overthinking this?
