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Looking for advise on the type of lighting used for a freshwater aquarium with live plants. Is there a good website which you know about or can you offer advice on what I should be purchasing?

Hi,

Welcome to FP

The type of bulb is easy enough to answer. Flourescent lighting, not incandescent. Any normal flourescent tube will do, no need for the fancy expensive ones in a LFS. Just make sure it's marked "daylight" or has a temp in the range of 6500K (this should be marked on the packing).

After the type the next consideration is how much light or how many bulbs you need. This will depend on the size of your tank and what kind of plants you intend to grow and if you intend to use Co2 injection or not. Different plants have different light requirements. Some do Ok with little light some absolutely need very bright light to survive.

Minimum should be 1-2 watts per gallon. I.E. for a 20 gal tank you need a minimum of 20 watts to watts of light. With 1 WPG you will be limited to the type of plant you can grow, with 2 wpg you have a greater choice. Anything above 2 WPG you really need to be thinking about some form of C02 supplementation to get any benefit from the additional brightness and avoid algae problems.

The key to starting a successful planted tank is matching your selection of plants to the amount of light you have available. If this is your first planted tank I'd reccomend starting with a low light set up and easy plants to match. After you've got your feet wet so to speak you can move on to brighter light and more difficult plants and Co2 set ups etc, if that's the way you want to go. A low light tank with simple plants can be very attractive, certainly more so then a tank full of fancy colorful plants rotting and dying.

A good place to get information on plants is http://www.plantgeek.com. They have a handy search that allows you to get information on plants according to their light requirements (low, med, high etc) this is a good place to find plants that are compatible with your set up.

Phew...HTH

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Bernard it looks like another Aussie "hotboost" on you help list.

Keith

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Thank you very much for your reply. Very helpful & much appreciated.