Help me figure out lighting on dream build!

[TD1260]

Hey everyone!

The wife finally gave me permission to dedicate an entire room to my fish tanks… I guess I’m one of the lucky ones. The plan right now on one wall is to have three of the 50 gallon lowboy frag tanks, two 40 gallon breeder tanks., and an aqueon 75 gallon. I am partial to Red Sea products as that is what I currently have however, I also have a kid on the way so I have to do this on a tight budget which I know in this trade is an oxymoron. I’m ideally treating the frag tanks as grow out tanks for Frags I will be trading and selling. I have an idea for what I want to do for lights, but I’m curious what the community thinks as well. I am not opposed to dedicating specific tanks to different types of corals, such as a softy tank and an LPS tank. For anyone helping here remember, I need to do it on a budget but again I don’t wanna screw myself into having to do massive upgrades later thanks for the help everyone!…. I will post pictures once everything is up and running!

 

[toothybugs]

You can run tanks just fine on any of the various blackbox LEDs and a timer if you don't care about things like internal controls, ramping, etc and are cool with basic on/ off features.

Otherwise, there are SO many options out there that unless you will have something like an SPS-dominant tank or a macroalgae tank you will most likely be fine with literally any light out there. Giving some working parameters will help. Your question is not unlike someone asking for a car recommendation without giving any specifics about previous experiences with brands, necessary capabilities, the actual budget, and so on because your budget is probably very different than mine, i.e. $5K to you hits differently than $5K to me, or to that fella Bill over there.

 

[toothybugs]

Speaking from personal experience, I would highly HIGHLY suggest getting your kid into daycare first, THEN figure out what your free time and budget will look like. Cuz it's gonna be wildly different 6 months from now and the last thing you want to do is a teardown just when things are getting warmed up.