Native marine aquaria are pretty scarce. Little information exists on how to be successful in maintaining healthy coldwater marine systems in domestic aquaria.

Hopefully this record of my failures, triumphs and ideas will assist others interested in keeping some of our fascinating, beautiful and often little known sea denizens in aquariums.

Saturday, 7 July 2012

Lighting Updates

The search for solutions to getting enough light in the tank continues. The light panel fitted last year does not seem able to meet the needs of many of the plants typical of a south coast shallow rock pool. Whilst red algaes, particularly fine ones, seem to thrive, macro green algaes simply do not.
Crusting pink coralline algaes do well, but branching ones are stunted.
Green hair algaes are a nuisance unless heavily grazed by snails.

Recently I trialled a 50W LED floodlight, supposedly equivalent to a 500W halogen lamp. It falls far short of expectations! I built a new hood to allow the installation of 8 of these if the 1st seemed adequate for purpose - but at £65 each will probably not buy more.

A few days ago I also tried 6 no. cool white 10W LED downlights. These too disappointed.

50W floodlight only

plus the 6 no. 10W LEDs

Plus the red and blue LEDs in the light panel

Now the white LEDs in the light panel have kicked in too

Images were taken with a Canon 5D Mark 2 using a 50mm f1.4 lens at f2.2, 1/60th second at ISO 400

That, for anyone who isnt into photography, indicates that light levels are really low.
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