Ok have a natural light question I am building a 55g long and am going to place it in my living room which has 2 and a half foot wide windows on the east side and 9ft of window facing south. The tank will get morning sun but will close curtains during the heat of the day. Unless it's winter than I leave the curtains open because it helps heat the house. What kind of lights do I need to add for a low/med light tank?
Just in case this is relevant I am in the panhandle of Texas.
Best thing to do is just try it, i have my tanks in front of a window but it's south facing and only really gets morning light and little mid day full intensity(then again im in scotland and high intensity sunlight is somewhat of a rarity ) for the rest of the day it's just indirect. Try leaving the curtains open all day but keep a close eye on things, if it starts to cause the temperature to climb too much you'll need to find a solution to the problem. In the summer it will likely cause problems, you could perhaps put up a translucent screen so the light still gets through - just not at it's full intensity.
Yep, I moved my 37g tall from an apartment with the nearest indirect sunlight coming in from 12' away to a house where it's just a foot away from double patio doors. It gets around 12 hrs a day of indirect light and 2 hours of direct light in the late afternoon/early evening. The only thing I've had to do is up the fertilization schedule a bit to keep up with the increase light--other than that, it's been running smooth. GDA even went down, which is nice.
I was thinking I might have to experiment, I run air conditioning and lots of fans during the summer and close the curtains, so I am mainly worried about supplementing during those months which is like 8 of them around here. I guess if my tank gets hot I can but bags of ice in it.
I have avoided windows to also avoid land of algae. Maybe if you had some sort of back ground that was tinted or something similar on the back of the tank?
I have tanks that get a bit of sunlight. I find the winter provides the most direct light whereas the summer sun is too high. The problem is the variability. I have had algae blooms in the past. Right now I am not having a problem and I attribute that to the fact that the plant mass is large.
My plan is a heavy planted tank with a clean up crew, and some rainbows. I think the natural light will do awesome things for the rainbow fish and if I have a bit of algae so be it. I hadn't thought about temp fluctuation so I will stay on that.
Thanks for all the replies.
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