natural light???

The old tank was run fish only 125 with those cheap plastic hoods similar to the petco tanks just using a 2 t8 bulbs (mabe t12 even not exactly sure.

I do understand this is extremely not the norm but I like to push things.example being turning my mantis over and petting its belly lol. Ill ask my dad about orentation i have a horrible sence of direction.im liviing with my parents so I can only mod their house so much lol the tank would be in the center of a bay window being exposed on 3 side. No obstructions to speak of.im on long island in ny.

 

the tank is pretty sweet I must add aswell lol. I am trying to add lighting with out taking away from the simplistic look of the chi so the best I can do lightingwise is afew leds and possibly the natural sunlight. I don't want clip ons or pendants I feel they will take away from the aim of the tank.im not doing it to cut costs, id pay if there was a technology to suite my goals I just don't think there is yet lol.

 

I understand what you mean about pushing things - I ran without a skimmer on my 120 gallon tank for about 8 months. But I had 2 small fish in there that entire time and did weekly water changes. I anticipated my limitations.

I do not believe you will have good long term success with keeping a nem in a nano tank using sunlight at our latitude. We do not have consistent enough sunlight. We go from over 9 to over 15 hours of daylight in a year's time. In the winter you are looking at only a few hours of direct sunlight a day and at best in the summer you might get up to 6 hours of direct sunlight - still not enough to be used ALONE IMHO.

If you are supplementing with sunlight you may have better luck.

 

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around why the light through a window would be shifted towards red? Sunlight has a lot of red, which will not be filtered out when passed through a window, but is filtered out after the first meter or so of water. So red is an unnatural spectrum for corals, but some nuisance algae, for example those found in shallower waters, such as intertidal zones for example, may utilize it well.

Another issue though is heat though. I think this could be a big issue if placing a small tank in a window.

 

Maybe "shifted towards the red" is a bit misleading.

You are right - plenty red in natural sunlight. But the difference natural sunlight has a full spectrum. The windows then, as I would presume it, remove the bluer end of the spectrum and allow only the red through (smaller wavelength penetrates better through glass!? whereas longer wavelength transmits better through water!?!?)

 

I can't think of any reason why glass would filter out blue and not red. It, like water, should filter out red and not blue, however, tremendously less so. So little that it isn't noticeable and you basically have the the spectrum of the sun. This will vary a bit depending on the day, but probably averages around 5800K or so; closer to 20000K on a cloudy day.

You probably don't want to light your tank with a 5800K bulb though.

 

EXACTLY what I have been trying to say lol.

 

+1 a window is not going to be you are going to need a solar tube

 

:thumb_up: Sounds good to me. Esspecially true on a small tank. Not always a big tank though, were you have room for more supplemental lighting:
Tank of the Month - December 2008 - Reefkeeping.com

 

I'm surprised that someone hasn't come up with a "light filter" that we could place over the back of our tanks that "can potentially" face a window, in order to block out the red rays and allow the blue to pass through, similar to the way water filters the lighting spectrum. With all the technology we have today, I'm shocked we don't have access to something that can do this.