5.5 Pico lighting?

So, in my never ending quest to get a tank up and running, I figured I could try out a 5.5 AGA pico. I'm basically copying the most common AIO setup I've seen with the MJ 400, etc. Just not sure about the lighting. Would the Coralife mini be enough for zo's and maybe a mushroom or two? I'd probably end up eventually getting a watchman/shrimp combo once I'm comfortable with the pico routine.

TLDR: Coralife mini? Or do I try to find something better suited for this?

 

I actually have the coralife mini compacts and they are working great for all corals I have. I have two 20watt 50/50 for my 10gal. The only corals that I had in there that I had to remove was a couple of my sps corals. My 2 green monti caps and my red monti digi. But I have blue, red and green striped mushrooms, eagle eye zoos, purple zoos, kenya tree, devils hand leather, anthelia (they typically need high lighting and they are doing great!) and even a big LPS frogspawn that when I first got it started out as 3 heads and now pretty much has 5 and I've only had it under the coralife minis for about 2 weeks. Personally any softy and pretty much any leather will do fine under the minis, just make sure you really look into the LPS and sps you get. I am not getting any more SPS though personally. as long as you don't go for the really sensitive corals you should do fine with the minis.

 

Cool, glad to hear. As I said, I don't want anything crazy. No SPS in this, basically just a zo and shroom desktop tank. maybe a kenya if I feel ambitious? lol.

 

oh ya, zoos and mushrooms will be fine under that lighting. Good Luck.

 

I have a kenya with power compacts a 13w it loves it, mind you I do supplement the day light with and led strip.

 

The Coralife mini I'm looking at is actually a t5HO setup, it's 9 inches long. iirc, it was meant as a fuge light for the biocubes?

 

should be fine, its most likely going to be fairly bright so be sure to acclimate the corals to lights through a few days moving the lights lower a bit each day, or if you cant lower and raise the lights, start the frag in a cave and pull it out a bit each day and the slowly move it to where you want it.

 

Yeah, most of the corals I've been looking at at my LFS, are under some seriously intense lighting. So, who knows, if I do get this up and running anytime soon (would be nice) I may not even need to acclimate them to the lighting.

 

I would go LED. Pay a little more and have incredible coloration, control and growth.

This DIY kit could be perfect for what you want. Or go with a few more LEDs and you could keep whatever you wanted for not much more.

07 LED Plug-n-Play Retrofit Kit

 

Wow, never even saw that one. Probably because I wasn't looking at plug-m-play stuff as I'm more of a DIY guy, but for 70 bucks, that's actually not that bad. I'll most definitely have to keep that in mind. T%hanks for showing me that! I'll definitely consider it. Just wonder what size heatsink I would use for that. Maybe the 4.25x9?