UV Trouble

[alton]

In the new Coral Magazine that I picked up from Alex's this weekend it had a good or bad story how ever you want to look at it about UV and Metal Halides and what happens when you don't replace the lense on the fixture. It was nice to hear one of the pro's stories of when something goes wrong. I am not pushing the sale of the magazine, but the article is worth it and hopefully it stops others from making the same mistake. I put this post in this forum because I think it covers all forums, equipment, emergency, and general.

[Reef69]

...ok...What happens???

[pickle311]

more info please, I can't drive all the way to SA for a magazine

[alton]

Article is serveral pages but in a nut shell death to fishes and coral a like. The fish that didn't die became blinded and fins where burned. Corals I think bleached out.

[Reef69]

..And you got the mag. where?

[Thunderkat]

Yeah, UV light is bad in large doses. It really wreaks havoc on human eyes (hence UV protection on glasses and car windows).

[pilot_bell777]

so how often are you suppose to replace the lenses?

[alton]

The writer broke his lense and did not have another so he raised his light so to reduce the UV rays, but he still had the problems mentioned. I picked up the mag. at Wolf Reef.

[pilot_bell777]

Ah....thought you were saying that we needed to replace the lense along with the bulbs or something.

Ya...no good to run without a lense!

[JimD]

This is normaly associated with double ended bulbs, on single ended bulbs the outter glass envelope is the uv protectant so theres no need for an additional "lens".