Lighting?

[Insane Teen]

I think plants are the coolest thing (other than fish) you can put in a tank. It just makes the tank so much cooler.

But I have a question, do you need a special light bulb for your tank for the plants to grow? Right now, I have lighting that came with the tank, it is 15W (which I think is 15 watt). I this enough, or do I need to get another bulb.

And, also I've been using plant nutrient, its called FloraPride. Is this a good nutrient, or is there a better one?

The plants in my tank right now are:
- 1 Tiger Lotus (Nymphaea Zenkeri)
- 4 Amazon Sword (Echinodorus amazonicus)

Thanks for your help, much appreciated!

[xximanoobxx]

What kind of light do u have right now???
Incandescent or sumin else such as power compact, fluorescent.....

[Insane Teen]

What kind of light do u have right now???
Incandescent or sumin else such as power compact, fluorescent.....

It came with the tank, I think it might be compact, but I'm not sure.

[xximanoobxx]

Does the bulb look like this???
[Only Registered Users Can See Links.]

Or does it look like this???
[Only Registered Users Can See Links.]

[Insane Teen]

Its long, more like a lightsaber.

[cocoa_pleco]

Its long, more like a lightsaber.

those are fluorescents, yours is probably a 15w

[Holyvision]

Idea lighting for a planted system is 3 to 5 watts of lighting per-gallon, and it needs to be in the 6700ish kelvin range for them to grow.

A iron-rich substrate like Flourite, substrate tabs, nutrient additives like flourish, carbon additives like Excel, CO2 systems, good lighthing, and luck all help with plants!

I'm quite trusting of the seachem line of products, like Flouish, Excel, Prime, etc. and recommend them.

[Adrian]

To grow plants, most aquarium hoods come with a flourence bulb. These are the most common bulbs on the market, cheap, easy to replace, and provide good light to see the fish. The worst on the market to grow plants, as they do not have enough watts

To get good lighting for plants, many people have gone to Power Compact lighting. These offer better watts, and still give you light to see your fish. Be aware of the lights you buy however, as many are equipped with 50/50 or a blue actinic bulb, which may make your tank look neat, but does absolutely nothing for your plants, and encourages algae growth.

2 watts per gallon is a good place for low light plants, and will allow you to have a very nice looking tank without the hassles and cost of using co2. The more experienced you get in growing plants, the higher the wattage, you will definately see a benefit to using co2.

Power compact bulbs that are best for plants will be at the 6700k or kelvin which utilize the yellows, reds and greens that the plants need for photosynthesis.

Hope that helps.

[W_Oz]

JUst out of curiosity, how big is your tank?

Amazon swords get big... and I can hardly manage 2 in my 55, I couldn't imagine 4 in my tank.

ANYWAY!!!! Regardless, 15W won't cut the mustard. You'll need to get some bigger, and more expensive (maybe), lighting to get your plants happy. With a Tiger in the tank (hehe) You'll need "medium lighting" what ever that means. But your swords will appreciate even more light (high lighting).

FLoraPride is a fine product, I wouldn't worry about setting up a dosing regime just yet. I'm going to assume a "low-tech" approach to this and keep things as simple as possible.

Assuming you have a tank which has a footprint between 30x12" (20gal Long or 29gal) and 48x18" (90gal) we'll use the "Watt Per Gallon" rule of thumb since this breaks down with larger and smaller tanks).

Amazon Swords are heavy root feeders (says so in their plant bio) and as such they should have an iron rich substrate (Flourite and Eco Complete are pretty good). That isn't to say that you need to have a special substrate, but it helps with these critters. If you've planted in gravel or sand, fret not, it isn't the end of the world. You're plants can do fine even without special stuff to grow in.

ANyway, the main thrust of your question, LIGHT! You've landed a high light plant in the Amazon Sword and as such you'll want to approach 3 Watts per Gallon of Water to keep that thing happy. Given that you're blub is a 15Watt I'll assume (I'm guessing here) that means you have an 18" tube which roughly means you have something between a 15 to 29 gallon tank. Which also means I can't really use the WPG guide if you have a smaller tank. But moving right along and I'll assume you have a 29 gallon tank (30x12"). That means that you'll ultimately want to get 90Watts of light over that tank, and not just any light, 5000K to 10000K light (6500K and 6700K being accepted as more or less ideal and commonly available in pretty much every Daylight fluorescent bulb for most applications). Or roughly 10,000 Lumens to hit "High Light". Now I know what you're thinking, "Good gravy that's a lot of light!". Well, it is, and it'll be expensive to get there. So unfortunately you'll now be going from Low-Tech (lighting wise) to High-Tech.

So from a lamp point of view I'm going to recommend this fixture ([Only Registered Users Can See Links.]) which should take care of your lighting problem. Assuming you have a 29 gallon tank. Actually, since depth isn't much of an issue with planted tanks you could probably do just as well with this ([Only Registered Users Can See Links.]) or this ([Only Registered Users Can See Links.]) lamp since you have the same footprint as a 20Long but I don't know that the lumen count would be high enough for either of the 65 Watt lamps so let's assume that 90-ish Watts is what we'd want to shoot for. (Especially since a 10 gallon tank needs around 70 watts to reach high light conditions).

After you get your light squared away, you're next challenge will be to buy an appliance/lamp timer. Set it for 10 hours on/day and then observe you're plants and tank closely. Your swords will likely be the first to show signs of nutrient deficiency, depending on your substrate and other water parameters. If you aren't using an iron rich substrate you'll likely see iron deficiency crop up first, you can dose with Seachem Iron (or other commercially available iron supplement) or root tabs at the base of these plants. But we'll worry about that when we get there later.

Another word of advise, plan on losing those swords somewhere down the line. Like I said, they do get big and even one of them in a 29 gallon tank will end up leaving your fish no where to swim.

I apologize for the somewhat rambling nature of this reply, but for what it's worth, I feel it's complete enough to answer your immediate questions. And don't worry about CO2. That's a whole ball of wax that doesn't need to be dealt with right now. YOu can grow plants just fine without it and a lot of other fancy equipment that some plant keepers see as "must have".