Lighting isn’t just about your home and garden; it’s also about fish’s homes and gardens – aquariums! Aquarium lighting is a specialist subject and a vital one too – unless you get the lighting of your aquarium exactly right, the health of your fish will suffer; you hold the power over life and death in your own hands! And, as it’s the size of your tank or aquarium that dictates the sort of lighting you need, in the world of the aquarist, size really is everything!

In lighting your aquarium, you are trying to mimic the fish’s natural habitat as closely as possible. Some fish come from naturally shaded water – rivers deep in the rain forest, for instance – and are adapted to indirect light for just a few hours a day.

On the other hand, tropical fish and coral reefs come from clear shallow water where the full spectrum of sunlight reaches them. That word ‘spectrum’ is important.

Light spectrum is denoted by a Kelvin rating; the higher the Kelvin rating of a lamp, the wider the spectrum of light it provides. It makes sense that fish from shallow waters need higher Kelvin rated lamps, because they are adapted to survive in almost full spectrum light. As a rule of thumb, if you plan to keep coral and tropical fish, you will need lamps rated at 10,000K and above, although the exact lamp you need will be determined by the depth of your tank or aquarium.

If you don’t want to shell out on metal halide lamps, you could use fluorescent tubes instead; indeed, fluorescent tubes are provided with most beginner aquarium lighting kits. Bear in mind though, that you will need at least two fluorescent tubes. They do have a couple of advantages over metal halides: they don’t generate heat and they are cheaper. On the other hand, metal halide light is of higher quality and seems to shimmer very attractively on the surface of the water. .

To learn all you need to know about maintaining a healthy aquarium, you are advised to get expert advice or cultivate friendship with an expert aquarist. If your main interest is keeping marine plants and animals, you will need extra information about keeping a marine aquarium, and think about marine aquarium lighting.

Now you know that size really does matter; make sure you don’t disappoint by exploring our specialist aquarium lighting.

Tags: Aquarium Lighting

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Aquarium Lighting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.