Yeah I am not running them for a long time yet because I am not wanting to over stress the corals that I have. I had a large jump in wattage with the MH. Should I slowly increse the length of time I have the MH on or should I just start to leave them on for 8 to 10 hours?
If your corals are used to just VHO's you should take it slower. Start of extending your halides on time by 30 minutes twice a week and always watch your tank temp.
I finally got the lighting that I wanted in my tank. I have 2 MH bulbs one 400w blueline 20K, one 175w 10K, three VHO (would be 4 but I am out of space in the hood) 2 15w blue party bulbs (for a moon light effect). The ballast that that I got is a coralvue for the 400w, home made ballast for the 175w, and a icecap 660 for the vhos. At the moment I have one fan running on it and the temperature ranges from 80 to 84. One more fan one or two small fans on the other side should bring the temp down just a little more. Oh and I they have all been on for 9 hours now with no problems. This may be a little over kill on the lights for a 55 gal, but I wanted to get all the lights and ballast that I will need for when I decide to upgrade to a larger tank.
really? thats cool...I wasnt looking forward to spending so much on MH
if I built a prop tank 3-4' long x 2' wide x 8-10" deep...could I get away with a pair of 90w a couple inches off of the water? I wanna do some softies and some stonies...(lots of zoos and shrooms around the egdes of the tank.