Question:

I currently have an arcadia 4x24 watt t5 luminaire and the tubes are not very good (made by Arcadia), i have seen pictures of tanks with D-D giesemann T5's and i am very impressed.

My tank is only 12 inches high but i may be upgrading to a 16inch high tank, i would like to know what tubes and how many would you reccommend? 

I keep soft corals and i am looking into keeping basic lps corals such as hammer, frogspawn, duncans and trumpets. I would mainly like the tank to look nice but have quite good growth as i like aesthetics.

As i only have 4 tubes to play with this may be hard as i dont know about them all too much. My luminaire has 2 switches and i like to immitate dawn/dusk effects.

Answer:

The D-D tubes which we supply to and dual brand with Giesemann are excellent and known to be so throughout the world.

The tube that I would use would be the Aquablue Plus which is a 60:40 white:blue mix and our main marine spectrum.

This bulb will give a good colour and high intensity for corals on either tank and will allow the growth of both hard and soft corals.

You have 4 tubes which are linked together in pairs and so to have a dusk and dawn setting you would normally add a blue actinic on one of the pairs. However unless you add 2 blue bulbs then you will still have a fair degree of white in the spectrum when there are only 2 bulbs on and it will not look like a dusk or dawn effect.

What I would suggest is that you put 4 Aquablue tubes on the fitting and then add supplementary lighting for the dusk and dawn in the form of a relatively low cost T8 tube which you can rest unseen on the stress bar and fitted with an actinic tube.

Alternatively you can buy a moonlight unit with blue LED's which can be used at the beginning and end of the day.

This format will give you the greatest intensity from your 96 watts

Hope this helps

Stuart