Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

My 400w metal halide bulb just went. It was a solarmax $89 bulb. It was for vegetative. I've turned more to aquaponics lately and would like to flower a couple plants. Just wondering what brands/kalvin rating I should shoot for? The aquarium has ornamental fish such as clown loach.

The lighting for aquaponics is the same as hydroponics. If you're indoors then you're looking for 6500k and 2700k lights (the 2700k is for fruiting, the 6500k is for greens). As I understand it, you want to get 5000 lumens per sq ft. 16 hours of a light a day for greens, and then cut it down to 12 hours for fruit.

Now all of this is for "optimum" results so being exact probably isn't the most important part of the system .

Standard MH globes will have a Kelvin rating around 6400k, good for vegetative growth and keeping plants compact, also okay for flowering, but not ideal. HPS globes will be around 2700k, are good for flowering plants, will cause slight internode stretching in vegetative stage compared to MH. The ideal method is to use MH during vegetative the stage, and HPS during flowering/fruiting, but standard HPS globes cannot be run on an MH ballast.

You can get "Retrofit" globes that have the spectrum of a HPS globe, but will run on an MH ballast but, Sunmaster are probably the best brand of Retrofit globe to buy, the HPS equivalent in a Retrofit MH globe is called Warm Deluxe. Using one of these allows you to run two different spectrums off the one ballast.

Mr Damage.