Reccomendations for my mini reef

[matt]

Typical incandescent bulbs are not appropriate for reef lighting. They're far too yellow and generate way too much heat. You might read the chapter on lighting in Eric Borneman's book "Aquarium corals". You can also find useful basic information on reef lighting in Ron Shimek's small book "Coral Reef Aquarium".

Most nanos of your type use power compact florescent bulbs. Forget the watts/gallon bit, that's useless. You need to think about PAR (photosynthetic available radiation) which is a measure of the intensity of light at wavelengths useful to photosnthetic animals. The difficulty in lighting tiny tanks is that you need a certain level of PAR to grow corals, regardless of the size tank they're in. Often getting enough intensity to saturate the photosynthetic algae present in corals requires enough light to present serious heat problems in small tanks.

HTH

Matt

[longhorn_20m]

I think he is saying that he has an incandescent fixture and will be adding two of the screw in compact 50/50 bulbs.

I don't know the exact wattage on the bulbs, but I'm thinking around 9-10 watts. I doubt you will be able to keep really anything except maybe some mushrooms, even if that.

I would invest in some kind of retrofit lighting from www.ahsupply.com if you really plan on having corals.

[matt]

Ok, now I see. Probably those bulbs are useless for keeping corals, sorry to say. The suggestion about ahsupply is great; that's exactly where i got my nano lighting and I kept clams, all sorts of SPS, etc, in there successfully. I used the 2X 36WP.C. set up on a standard 10 gallon tank. The ahsupply reflectors are very good and make a huge diffference. Good luck!