What is considered low moderate and high lighting?

[waack]

I know that in today's lighting there are several aspects that are required to determine what is appropriate lighting for a freshwater tank. I found a few charts online describing lighting and what is considered high low and moderate. I always thought i had low lighting being the fact that i just bought 50-70 dollar reflectors. Do people agree with these charts as a rough guide.




Obviously color of the bulb comes into play. But say I have a double globe T5HO with one globe being 10k and one being 6.7k i have borderline high lighting? Oh and the tank is 2ft deep with the light being 1 inch above the top of the water.

[Cliff]

I have found those charts to be a good guide, but there are a lot of other variables to consider as well. Like the color temp (as you have mentioned), and the quality of the reflectors just to name two of them.

I currently have a two bulb T5HO fixture on my 90 gallon tank (24 inches tall) and I would consider that moderate lighting levels. My low to mid light requiring plants are doing OK and I have no real algae problems in the tank at all.

[waack]

Great that gives me some piece of mind, I have never been serious about planting a tank just buying plants i see and like and seeing how it goes. Now I know moderate lighting is a possibility i might look more carefully at what i can grow in my new tank, also the dwarf hairgrass i put in there might grow better than i expected.

[Cliff]

I've had great luck with the easier to grow plants like vals, java firn, horn-wart, and penny-wort. They grew to the point I got tired of trimming them all the time and gave most of them to my dad for his tank. I also have fluorite plant substraight as well

[mizzoutank]

Personal recommendation, crawl before you run. lol

I ran into planting my tank and became a pro at growing green hair algae.lol

It just becomes a science of playing with lights/ferts/co2. I didn't supply enough co2 and algae grew.

so my next set up will be low tech, low/mod lights-in hopes of having better luck like cliff.

Good luck!

[FreakyFishie]

Just some food for though, while those are great for lights requiring removable bulbs, recent light technologies like LED do not quite follow these due to their ability to concentrate plant usable lightwaves and cater to them, therefore they don't quite follow the PAR system either. Which is one of the main reasons for the "LEDs good enough for plants" debate because if you go by PARs, then they shouldn't work, but they do, and do it great at a fraction of the power consumption :D

[funkman262]

You should cite the source or at least give credit to the person that went through the trouble of providing that info. And here's the updated thread providing PAR data for specific fixtures because the quality of the ballast and reflectors make a huge difference in the efficiency of the bulbs.

Just some food for though, while those are great for lights requiring removable bulbs, recent light technologies like LED do not quite follow these due to their ability to concentrate plant usable lightwaves and cater to them, therefore they don't quite follow the PAR system either. Which is one of the main reasons for the "LEDs good enough for plants" debate because if you go by PARs, then they shouldn't work, but they do, and do it great at a fraction of the power consumption :D

This is true because of the difference in PAR vs PUR. PAR is the entire range of wavelengths from 400-700nm, but plants photosynthesize more efficiently at some wavelengths than others. When the correct LEDs are chosen, you get a much higher PUR:PAR ratio than other light sources that have high peaks in the green, orange and yellow wavelengths. Granted these wavelengths are still thought to be important because they are able to penetrate the leaves of plants deeper than red and/or blue (sorry my memory is a bit fuzzy on the specifics), and also if there's no green wavelength provided the leaves can actually turn black. So a wide range of wavelengths will always be important for the health and beauty of plants, and with more research and experience we'll continue to be able to grow plants more efficiently at much lower PAR values while likely reducing algae growth as well.

[FreakyFishie]

I've grown hydroponically for years, the LEDs lights that have been proven to work the best both in the field and in my personal experience contain NO green light waves, and I can assure you, I had the greenest plants I've ever seen in my life no black :) Plants only reflect green light, it's why they look green to us, they do not absorb it at nearly a rate that impedes or promotes growth. It ends up looking like you had a UFO land in your house because the grow light LEDs for plants are purple or magenta primarily. Red and blue are the wavelengths plants use to grow, blue more for vegetation and red for blooming and reproduction :)

[funkman262]

I've grown hydroponically for years, the LEDs lights that have been proven to work the best both in the field and in my personal experience contain NO green light waves, and I can assure you, I had the greenest plants I've ever seen in my life no black :) Plants only reflect green light, it's why they look green to us, they do not absorb it at nearly a rate that impedes or promotes growth. It ends up looking like you had a UFO land in your house because the grow light LEDs for plants are purple or magenta primarily. Red and blue are the wavelengths plants use to grow, blue more for vegetation and red for blooming and reproduction :)

I can assure you that if they were green, than they were receiving green wavelengths. As you said yourself, they REFLECT green light. Our eyes see wavelengths that are reflected from objects, so if there's no green light to reflect, then how can they look green? NASA has actually been working on LED research to grow vegetables under lower power consumption and found a mixture of blue and red LEDs that works great, and they found that under these lights the lettuce that they were growing turned black but tasted just like lettuce grown under white light.

EDIT: You can read more about the NASA reference I made here.

[FreakyFishie]

They were only green when removed from the growing area, otherwise they were purple because that's all you can seen lol. I can tell you that the lights contained only red and blue chips, no green.



Those are the wavelengths for the Kessil LED plant grow lights in purple and magenta, then this is the wavelength chart for their aquarium light a150 Amazon Sun:
it's a 6700k light which is their version of natural sunlight, the green wavelength is there because it is meant for viewing, vs plant grow lights which are meant for enclosed rooms for plants only that are not looked at for their beauty.

When I say my plants were green, I mean SO DEEP GREEN that they did almost look black. Just a really rich green, like nothing I've ever seen on plants grown with "natural" colored lights or with sunlight.