400W Radiums Warming Up Over Peninsula

[Biggles]

I fired up the two 400W Radiums this morning one at a time so you could share the beautiful grossness that is a halide bulb warming up to operating temperature. You guys with T5's or LED's don't know what you're missing.

I love the smell of dust burning in HPS ballasts in the morning.........

 

[jdpeters]

Nice! I had a 150 watt on a 20 gallon and loved it. I paid 75 for the whole fixture brand new. By a company named Fish Need It. Cheap as hell but it did the job

 

[ZachR32]

man thats beautiful. really loving that scape and your fish selection!!

 

[TNT32D]

I miss those days

 

[Biggles]

This is the rock island closest to the peninsula end panel just before i put it in the display Zach. I threw out all the old rock when i found AEFW and stripped the display of everything except the corals and fish months back.

Tip - don't make rock scapes when you're watching the movie Alien and very, very......... relaxed.

 

[stephj03]

Oh how I miss my halides.

 

[Guttersnipe]

Oh how I miss my halides.

Do you miss the heat and power bill?

 

[Guttersnipe]

I miss those days

What’s stopping you from going back the metal halide?

 

[stephj03]

Do you miss the heat and power bill?

Honestly I never really felt the difference like I thought I would

I’m an outlier though. I live coastal so heat isn’t significant beyond normal home AC settings and electricity is really expensive anyway in my market

Where I live, it’s all about staying below the baseline for the neighborhood. Even if I only use 3 Radions to try to light up my 300g, the rest of the gear puts me in a “high use” bracket above that baseline and my rate doubles to like $.5/kWH.

The most noticeable things to me are asthetics and that’s why I keep them for now. But prob gonna go to a diff fixture that uses more watts which will put me at almost the same draw I use to have on 4 Radiums.

 

[stephj03]

What’s stopping you from going back the metal halide?

Mainly aesthetics. 1. LED fixtures look really clean compared to big clunky MH reflectors and I didn’t want to have a good on this tank. And 2. Certain colors pop under LED especially all the recent stuff.

 

[rockskimmerflow]

Nothing like metal halides IMO. When I get a customer who gives me the proverbial blank check 'do it right' budget for a build. I spec halides, T5 actinics, and RB LEDs for supplements/'pop' effect at night. The halide during the daytime is unparalleled for natural visual aesthetic and coral growth.

 

[jda]

I love watching a halide fire up. One of my only regrets with them is that I cannot "pause" the operation for a minute or two to get a longer look at some of the colors.