Lighting Help

I have a 29 gallon tank with 33lbs of live rock, everything in the tank is great. There is two perculla clowns, one yellow tang, and one watchman goby. One coral banded shrimp, some snails and some hermit crabs. My question is there are three groups of button polyps on my rock, is my lighting sufficent. It it the standard hood that came with my marineland saltwater starter tank but I replaced the bulbs with one reef sun 50/50 actinic and a coral sun bulb. I have a ocean sun 10,000k, should I be using it? Just give me some feed back or someone let me know about some idea's if you have them. Thanks

 

Im assuming these are PC's or T5's? 29gals is too small for a tang.

 

Sounds like you have standard fluorescents, so no, they're not sufficient for coral, unless you have a lot of them, which is just pointless. Buy better lights. Evaluate what kind of corals you want first.

Ditto on the tang. You need to move him to a bigger tank. If you don't have one then trade him back to the LFS. Remember to research a fish's requirements before you buy it. You can get into a lot of expensive and heart-breaking trouble if you don't.

 

What kind of lighting can i upgrade to without having to replace my whole hood which holds my filter and biowheel (which i plan to remove at somepoint)

 

Are the filter and biowheel connected to the hood? If this is the case and you don't want to remove them then if the hood is big enough, look into retrofit kits. It really depends on the corals you want to keep as to what lights you'll need to get.

If it is a small hood then buy a fixture to go in front of it. I would probably need to see a pic of your tank to be able to tell for certain.

Do you not have a sump or a wet/dry on it?

 

No sump

 

Here are some photos of my hood, what can I do about replacing the lights without having to change out the whole hood. By the way with the lights that I have in there should there be an actinic 50/50 or a 10,000k, which is better?

 

1. Those lights may not be able to support much coral :-/
2. Tangs get big, and are messy. They would turn your tank into a pit full of detritus and algae. If you are handy with electronics, you could take those t8 or t12 bulbs out and replace them with t5 or PC bulbs and ballast. Then you could support coral with assurance

 

How would I go about finding the proper lighting to replace what I have

 

You would need to buy proper endcaps and ballast. then just install caps where the t12 or t8 caps are and wire ballast to them. you can the new wiring right thru the area the old wiring was. heres a good t5 ballast......Buy T5 HO Electronic Ballast 2X54 Watt Here!

1 Q, how long are the existing bulbs?

And heres sockets/endcaps......
T5 Waterproof Endcap

It would take some work and planning to have everything fit in to existing hood, but it should be able to be done and the end result will be great!