I have an Oceanic 135gal. 6 foot reef. Fish, mushrooms, anchors, frogspawn, zooanthids, anemone, rockflower, Kenya tree, button polyps, star polyps. 1) I want to upgrade my lighting to T5's. What are the advantages and disadvantages? 2) If I upgrade to three metal halide boxes mounted into my canopy, would they be too much for my corals & would I hv to hv a chiller?
What watt MH? I like T5 but I think it would take a lot of bulbs to get the wattage you get from the MH. I have a 3 - 150w MH in a fixture with 4- 96w pc on my 180 and just use fans to keep it cool.
Depending on the wattage of MH and what you keep your house at you may need a chiller. The advantage of the t5's are that they more evenly distribute the heat over the water, as well as the light. T5's will provide excellent growth and coloration for your corals and the look you can get is endless due to the wide array of kelvin bulbs you can get. Halides do put off heat in more of a pinpoint and tend to "soak" into the water more heat wise.
I prefer MH over T-5's but thats just me. For the livestock you have I would go with T-5's as you have nothing that needs intense lighting that MH put out. But you will need about 6 T-5's from front to back and I haven't seen any six foot T-5's available yet. You could split the length with 3 footers but it might be cheaper to do MH's in the begining but heat is allways an issue with MH's plus your electric bill would be a little less with T-5's. You can use fans to remove heat from the canopy as suggested above and control the heat. It's really a personal preference to what lights you like. Heres somthing else to think about, see how much the cost would be to replace bulbs in a year or so.
You might not be able to get 2- 3ft. light fixtures under you canopy, you would have to check that out first. 3ft T-5 bulbs are 39 w. each so if you ran 2 fixtures of 6 each you would have 12 times 39= 468w of light. If you ran 3 150 MH's you would have 450w's. 175's=525w's. The corals you have are not high light demand corals and if you want some of the softies and lps up high on the reef for the waving action, and keep the lights in the canopy, I would use T5s or 150 or 175 MH and nothing more. The 150's, I would think would be comparable to T5's in heat production, although they do heat penetrate the water more, but 150's shouldn't be too bad. A good MH bulb can be run 18 mo., even 2 yrs, I'm talking quality, not cheapo's, where as the T5's are a florence bulb and needs to be changed around 9 months and probably can be stretched to a year.
Thanks for all the much needed advice. I think I will go with my original plan and upgrade to the T-5s.
