Don't Need Intense Lighting for Reef Tank anymore

[fishcraze]

No, I meant artificial lighting.. I'm looking at setting a reef tank in a covered patio in the backyard.. so that i could get natural lighting for my sps, lps, softies...

Does anyone here has their tank setup outside the house??? what is your experience - good and bad?

I jsut think of some of the pros and cons for this option:

Pro: don't need much artificial lighting and hence saving money on power usage, direct sunlight would give corals, especially sps a growth boost, easy setup for water changes and other maintaining (eg. don't care much about water spills, leaks, floor flooding, etc.), a lot of space for sumps, reactor, top off, etc..

Cons: big ALGEA bloom possible due to the tremendous lighting. Will need a really good chiller in the summer (hence $$ savings from lighting is cancelled of by chiller usage) and even fans (but don't have to care about humidity), and then a lot of heaters in the winter. Note: temperature in Houston: max 110 degree F in summer and min 32 degree F in winter!!!

[bprewit]

I tried to do away with artificial lighting by installing a couple of sun tubes over my tank. To avoid algae growth I added filters from this place:
http://www.studiodepot.com/store/index.cgi?cmd=view_item&parent=-1006-1049-1155-1161&id=7750
and had decent success but temp increase was more than I could handle without a chiller but the corals seemed to like the sunlight!

[witecap4u]

Sun tubes????

[fishtankrob]

Sun tubes are cool, i have them in my kithchen. Its a great idea to use them over a tank though, nerver thought of it.

[::pete::]

I have installed many of these. (http://www.solarflairskylights.com/)

Pete

[bprewit]

I still have a couple of blue filters that I will give someone if they are interested in trying the sun tube concept or any other project they think would work.