Does anyone use Coralife ColorMax Bulbs for the fish tank aquarium ?
I will be setting a 180 gallon cichlid tank . and was wondering how you felt about Coralife ColorMax bulbs .. Any info would help ,, Thank you
i will not have any plants in my tank
Personally, I am not much of a fan of Coralife, I used their product for one year (standard florescent bulb life) in a planted aquarium and saw no benefits. It was not bright enough and I wasn't impressed with the color is showed on my show guppies. I have since switched to Zoo-Med bulbs and my plants and color are much better.
I would recommend for your setup, either their Ultra sun Tri-chromatic or their Reef Sun 50/50 if you have cichlids with nice blues like Lamprologus brichardi. I personally use one Reef-Sun and one Flora sun for my planted set up. Zoo-Med is also a "Green" company, although, if they didn't make a good product that alone would not be enough for me to recommend them. You can read more about their bulb offerings here
http://www.zoomed.com/db/products/Search .php?SearchID=3&DatabaseID=2&Key words=Lighting&Heading=Aquarium& Search.x=24&Search.y=20
Edit: In case of confusion. I can only recommend the bulb mfg. that I use in my planted tanks, I am not trying to tell you to buy plant lights. The two bulbs I recommended for your set up are not "Plant" bulbs.
The Ultra-Sun is a Tri-Chromatic bulb meaning it has full simulated sun spectrum with trichromatic phosphors (The chemicals that electrons excite to make florescent bulbs glow) The full spectrum will make all of the colors on your fish stand out.
The Reef bulb I recommended is called 50/50 because it has half full spectrum sunlight phosphors and half "Actinic" phosphors. The Actinic phosphurs are meant to put out a very strong blue, simulating sunlight after it has penetrated several feet of water onto the sea bed. Because the 50/50 contains phosphors to stimulate a salt water reef setup, it makes blues in the cichlids I mentioned above really glow and still contains 50% full daylight tri-chromatic phosphors to bring out the rest of the colors as well.
Coralife also offers a tri-chromatic bulb and a 50/50 bulb but neither of those are the "Color Max" line. I have only tried the Color Max and it left me wanting. I did not try any of Coralife's other bulb lines after the color max.
Coralife info here
http://www.oceanicsystems.com/products/l ighting-replacement-bulbs/t-8-fluorescen t/index.php
A fairly good general write up on Aquarium lighting. Explains a few of the things I have said here more fully.
http://www.thatpetplace.com/pet/displayA rticle.web?Filename=../Article_archive/F ish/Equipment/FLighting.html
