# Need help on my Bio cube 14 lighting



## yomen122000 (Jul 30, 2013)

Hi every one, I need some feedback about my current lighting on my bio cube 14 gallon tank.

my stock lights are:

x1 24 watt 10k coralife power cf
x1 24 watt actinic blue

the set has been running for 6 months before I bought it from some one.

plants are:

R. routundifiola
E. tenellus
M. Quadrifiola- four leaf clover

liquid carbon, eco-complete, and micro ferts.

I wanted a low tech set up, but I am not sure about my lighting right now. should I keep both on, or should I turn off the actinic? 

I am not even sure how the actinic bulb helps on plant growth or how does it affect the watt per gallon rule. 

I intend on having a 2 watt per gallon.

thanks in advance for the advice every one!


----------



## TorontoPlantMan (Aug 16, 2013)

The light combo your running now is for a reef tank. 10,000k is a showbulb and the actinic blue bulb is useless in a planted tank. If you're fixture is by coralife then get the 6700k and colour max bulbs and do that as a combo or you can keep the 10,000k and get a 6700k or colourmax.

also just as a side note, WPG really isn't an accurate measurement for light. You need to either measure your PAR or do some extensive research. But do not use the WPG rule, it doesn't hold true at all. I've seen 100+ gallon tanks with under 1 WPG and beautiful plant growth.

I'm not too sure if you're on other forum's but if you go on PlantedTank.net forum there is an extremely good write up on PAR. I'll see if I can find it for you


----------



## TorontoPlantMan (Aug 16, 2013)

here is a link to the article I was talking about. This article only relates to spiral CFL's but if you do your research I'm sure you'll find an article about CF's.

http://www.plantedtank.net/forums/showthread.php?t=85667&page=2


----------



## GAT (Oct 8, 2011)

I think with CF you will have to change constantly right? I think CFL will be fine, you should get one of those clamp lights and put 13watt daylight CFL (its close to 6500k). This will be medium or low medium. Try it out, if you get algae then you can get lower watt bulb.

I use CFL and they work fine.


----------



## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

I bet that actinic bulb is causing a huge algae problem. I had bought used lights long ago and one of the bulbs was actinic and I used them for a little while until I could get proper bulbs and my algae went nuts from that bulb.


----------

