sola tubes, free light for the tank ?

[moneytank]

they finally started on our new house. When we designed it I had a dedicated fish room built into it. They are still about four months from being done so I have plenty of time to get all the equipment. One wall of the room will have a six foot tank facing out into the living room, one of the other walls will have an eight foot tank facing out into the game room. The six foot tank will have all my current sps corals in it. The eight foot tank will be a mixed reef, basically what ever the wife and kids want to put into it, (so not much telling). I was thinking of using the solatubes to light the eight foot ank as an experiment. If they work well maybing using them later on the six foot sps tank. Im sure i will have to have supplemental lights also, but still should get some useable (free) light from the solatubes. For those that dont know, solatubes are basically skylights. There is a long post on reefcentral about them in the link below.
Has anyone here done this before or have any thoughts, ideas about it?

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=56125

[RayAllen]

Never done it myself, but my wife and I watch shows about flipping houses and one of them put Solar tubes in the home. Very cool way to light your house. The only problem I would see would be Too much light. Right now we have what 14-15 hours of daylight. That is way to much for a tank. Great idea thou; I will follow this post.

[alton]

I would think you could put in some type of light damper to control the light and add a light for the winter when we do not have enough light

[Bill S]

My mother-in-law had 2 installed and WOW. They make a HUGE difference. That being said, I'm not sure they put out enough light to grow something...

[RayAllen]

I think they would grow Algae and thats where I see the problem.

[thedude]

There is a thread on RC in the advanced topics about several people using these on reef tanks. I think it's an incredibly creative way to light a reef tank and with enough of them, don't see a problem. You will want to still supplement with some actinic I would think however.

John

[mathias]

be our tester for us :) keep a build thread for both tanks... :) spoil us with pics and then we can all learn a lot and then do huge GROUP ORDER on some solar tubes lol

[erikharrison]

On that thread the owner does live in AZ and has a flat roof. You could do it, but would probably have to supplement, and with the way the weather is here, I wouldn't try it without halides.

[moneytank]

everything is still in the planning phase, so it will be awhile for updates. I do plan on supplementing. Either way i will be using less electricity so thats a good thing.

[caferacermike]

I had fully planned on doing this with the 400g tank I have. It's just a matter of us finding a house to make a contract on and I'll be cutting holes in the roof.

[Ping]

It will not be too much light and will be the cause algae problems. They could be supplemented with pendant luminaries. I would invest in a light meter and determine your supplemental needs after the tank is set up under the natural light source.

[mathias]

the guy who uses them in az says that he had no algae problems at all.....

[captexas]

If the tank is set up well, there shouldn't be algae problems. The aquarium in Hawaii has many of their tanks outdoors where they get natural sunlight all day. There is also that thread on RC of the guy in Spain whose tank is in the ground of his back yard and is naturally lit with no algae problems.

I think it would probably work great for a FOWLR tank or some softies. It would be cool to have a built in light sensor that would adjust your supplemental lighting to compensate for the changing natural light. Even without something like that, I think the tank would be closer to simulating nature. We tend to run our lights at full strength 365 days a year even though the sun doesn't shine everyday.