Lighting advice

[rdavidw]

I have a 150 gallon softy tank that been running since 1993. My lighting ballast went out and I couldn

[trockafella]

Awesome Tank.!! Try out the blue+ bulbs and maybe the fiji purple which has some red to it.. There are sooo many color combos for T5s.. You might wanna check out some other peoples tanks to see there color combo's.... I would have to think your getting a much better spread of light.. Does this fixture have individual reflectors for each T5 bulb..?

[Supernova26]

+1 on the blue + bulbs from ATI. Change all you actinic bulbs with those and the par will increase.

[Mando77]

I think you would really like some royal blue leds. They are hard to beat.

[surf&turf]

+1 on the blue + bulbs from ATI. Change all you actinic bulbs with those and the par will increase.

 

 

 

Switch your Actinics for ATI Blue + and the 10K for ATI Blue Special.

[amos]

You have a great looking tank! To answer one of your first questions, you don't need more light per se. Even though the tank may look darker to the eye, its more about the spectrum the new bulbs are casting rather than sufficiency of the lights to maintain your corals. Your eight bulb system is more than enough to maintain softies. For comparison, I only run four T5 bulbs and I have SPS, LPS in addition to softies.

 

At this point, as everyone else was alluding to, you can simply tweak the bulb combination to the get the right "color" you want from an aesthetic standpoint. I agree with the posts about changing your actinics to ATI blue+. That will increase your PAR (not that you need to), but also bright up the tank a bit. If its still not as light as you want, consider changing the 50/50s to 10K or even 6,500K. That will make the colors of your softies bright a bit. In general, just swap the "blue" bulbs for "white" bulbs until you get the desired look.

 

Jon