Aquarium Lighting - Play a Benevolent God and Give Your Fish the Best Environment You Can!

!±8± Aquarium Lighting - Play a Benevolent God and Give Your Fish the Best Environment You Can!

Aquarium lighting isn't just lighting, its specialist lighting; more than that, the way you light your aquarium really is the difference between life and death for your fish.

The idea is that the lighting system in your aquarium replicates as closely as possible the light conditions that your fish would enjoy in their natural habitat. The closer you get the better. Move too far away from the habitat lighting and your fish will become stressed and fail to grow. From a purely selfish point of view, if you don't have the right light in your aquarium, your fish will lose their colours, and the chances are that is exactly what you bought them for.

The important thing to understand when you look at aquarium lighting is the Kelvin rating; which is what the K numbers you see on aquarium lights represent. The Kelvin rating gives you some idea of the temperature of the light, that is, how warm or cold looking it is. Cold, blue light has a 'high tech' clinical feel to it and is around 10,000K; this is the sort of temperature that would be used for a tank where you keep reefs and plants. The lowest Kelvin rated aquarium lighting is around 5,500K; the lower rated lamps are used for aquaria with freshwater fish and no plant life.

The best lamps, which are available in a wide range of Kelvin ratings, are metal halide lamps. They produce a shimmer, not unlike sunlight shining on water. Metal halide lamps range in intensity from 75 watts to 1,000 watts and their only disadvantage is that they generate heat - so do be careful.

If you are a new aquarist, you'll probably start your aquarium lighting career with fluorescent lighting, which are the type that are usually provided as part of a lighting kit. Fluorescent tubes for aquaria come in a range of colour temperatures and in three standard sizes. Sizes are indicated by a T number; T12, T8, and T5. You'll need at least a couple of lights, depending on the size of your tank, because fluorescent lamps are far lower in terms of intensity than metal halide. On the plus side though, they don't get hot!

The topic of aquarium lighting is complex and wide ranging, and you would be well advised to get a book on the subject, unless you have a well-informed friend. We've only touched on the subject here, and we haven't got as far as even mentioning marine aquarium lighting!

Aquarium Lighting - Play a Benevolent God and Give Your Fish the Best Environment You Can!

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Use LEDs For Better Lighting in Your RV

!±8± Use LEDs For Better Lighting in Your RV

Do you have too many fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling of your RV? Manufacturers love to fill a rig with more than is needed -- it looks impressive and it increases the price. You can be shining too much light into the living space, or using too much electrical power to create the lighting, or both.

A prudent RVer will take a rational approach to lighting. LED lighting offers two ways to reduce the lighting in an RV to a reasonable level.

My situation is a typical example. The fifth-wheel RV that I use at my basecamp has sixteen 12-volt fluorescent fixtures, each containing two F15T8 tubes. Each fixture uses 30 watts (2.2 amps) of 12-volt power to produce an effective 1,100 lumens of white fluorescent light.

If all fixtures are turned ON at the same time, the wattage is 480 watts (40 amps), and that produces a rated luminosity of 27,480 lumens. But because of the limited light efficiency of fluorescent fixtures, the sixteen fluorescents only provide an effective 17,600 lumens (1,100 lumens each).

Oh yes, since the electrical efficiency of the ballast and lights is only about 50%, they are pumping 240 of those watts into heating the air in my rig. In my humble opinion, that is just too much lighting (and heating) for an RV, even a large one with 400 sq-ft of space.

My sixteen fluorescent fixtures are grouped into four sets of three each and four singles. By turning OFF two of the three fixtures in each group, we could reduce our consumption to 240 watts (20 amps), and still have an effective luminosity of 8,800 lumens. That helps, but the resultant lighting is lumpy. It is too bright in some areas and dim in other parts of the rig. So we still have too much lighting for some of the space we live in, and too little elsewhere.

The obvious solution is to switch to LEDs to replace the fluorescent -- and that is what I did. But I did more than simply replacing the fluorescents with LEDs, I considered the problem of having too much light.

When I switched to LEDs, I intentionally reduced the amount of light from each fixture by disconnecting the ballasts and installing a single 12-inch length of MyT.fLED LightStrip in each fixture. Each fixture now provides an fully effective 480 lumens of light, pointing downward into the room, so the total real lighting is 7,680 lumens, nearly what I gott by turning off eight of the fluorescent fixtures. And now the light is constant throughout the rig, just as we want it. At the same time I have reduced the electrical load for lighting from 480 to 96 watts, (40 amps to 8 amps).

As an added bonus, on warm summer evenings, I no longer have to use nearly 750 watts to power the air conditioner to remove the excess heat produced by the fluorescent fixtures with their inefficiencies. That can easily add up to an additional 3kwhr per evening, so I am saving 4.2kwhr per evening. When you live here in southern California that is only Body.90 per evening, but do that for four months and it quickly adds up.

At a retail cost of .20 each, the cost of converting all sixteen fluorescent fixtures is less than 0 with the 10% quantity discount. I get better light where I want it without heat or fluorescent radio interference or having to replace fluorescent tubes. And it takes about 5 minutes to convert a fixture.

Using LEDs is a win-win solution.

Use LEDs For Better Lighting in Your RV

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