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Building A Budget Reef Aquarium: Lighting

In Part #5 of our 30-episode series on Building A Budget REEF Aquarium, I make a lighting recommendation.

In the latest video, we're going over lighting. We've already gone over picking out the tank, stand, water movement, filtration, and the heater. Today is going to be the light.

In a reef aquarium, the lighting is very important, and it's often one of the most expensive purchases. That's because corals get the majority of their nutrition from light. They're photosynthetic animals, or rather, the symbiotic algae in them is photosynthetic. So having a good light that replicates the sun is going to allow them to grow and thrive. It's also how we look at the tank. If the light doesn't look good the tank's not going to look good. For this tank, we picked out this Fluval Sea Marine 3.0 Light Fixture 48".

There are many lights to choose from, but in general, this strip style of light will be one of the most affordable, and this is one reason we intentionally picked this tank and this light. And this Fluval Light is very affordable. It comes in a variety of lengths, and in our experience can cover about a one-foot front-to-back area. This 55-gallon tank is 13 inches. Just over one-foot front to back. One of these lights is going to be perfect for lighting up this tank. If we had a thicker aquarium, such as a two-foot front to back aquarium, we'd probably need two of these. With an 18 inch we'd probably also need two. Because we have a one foot front to back this is going to pair just perfectly with this tank.

Once we get this set up, we'll do a follow-up video showing you the power levels for the nerds. But I really think you shouldn't underestimate these guys, They give you a great light for the dollar, and these also are pretty feature-loaded. These lights are "waterproof". But that doesn't mean you can use them underwater. It means they're very splash-resistant, which is good because there's lots of splashing around an aquarium.

They also have Bluetooth control that lets you change the color of the light and ramp it up and down throughout the day. So this really is a premium feeling light at a budget price, which is what we're looking for with this build.

In relative proximity to the light, you can go ahead and program it. There's a sunrise mode that lets you set when you want the light to ramp up, when it starts ramping up, and when it finishes ramping up. There's a daylight setting that allows you to pick exactly what color you want the light to be throughout the day. We just have everything maxed. We could pull the colors down and tweak that. The sunset lets you know when you want the light to start ramping down and then when it finally finishes ramping down. There's a moonlight setting. We just have it at a blue 5%, so that will give you that nice dim blue light letting the corals glow at night. Then finally asleep. That's basically an off setting, so if you want the moonlights to run for a while and then turn off you can tell it when you want it to turn off. And it will automatically run the schedule. Give you that dawn-dusk effect every single day. These really are the features of lights that are a lot more expensive than this. The nice thing about it being Bluetooth is you don't have to worry about any Wi-Fi compatibility with your router or your network. Any phone should be able to use it just fine.

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Building A Budget Reef Aquarium: Lighting

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