Light confusion-help needed

From my understanding, in a 4 bulb T5 fixture and mixed reef, you should only have 1 actinic bulb tops, preferably 0! The reason being that you're not really getting any PAR out of an actinic bulb and with only 4 bulbs total, you'll need all the PAR you can get. It looks like actinics are really only good as supplemental light to MH's or in combination with 5 other T5 bulbs. In the above scenario the MH bulbs are providing all the PAR, the actinics just coloration..

If you're looking for the blue/flourescence an actinic bulb provides, you should choose a higher K bulb that provides some good PAR with a bit of actinic as well. Not a true actinic 460/420 bulb... Of course I found this out to late, and as such, I'm currently running 2 UVL actinics, a UVL 10k and 12k and really hate the coloration, and not really getting much PAR out of this combo.

Here's some combo's I will be trying in the next week with my 4 bulb fixture to hopefully get better coloration.

ATI Blue+
Fiji Purple
ATI Blue+
ATI Aquaspecial

or

ATI Blue+
UVL Aquasun
ATI Blue+
ATI Aquaspecial

maybe

ATI Blue+
UVL Aquasun
ATI Blue+
Fiji Purple

I know there's lots of mixed opinions on this topic, so take it for what it's worth. I for one will be losing my actinics all together, and instead going with Blue+ bulbs..

 

thx very much for the input, thats some good info.