Well, Yesterday I went out and bought a light hood for the planted tank. I must say, it is really nice. I got a Coralife Deluxe Series Double Linear Strip 6700k 65 watt light fixture plus legs so I can set it above the tank like how I prefer to run my planted tanks. I must say this thing is bright. In the photo at left, you can see how bright it really is. It has 2 plugs so I can run both lamps independantly if I wanted to plug them each into their own timer.
My plants LOVE having so much light. If you look closely, you can see a string of little oxygen bubbles rising up off one of the leaves. This formed about 20 minutes after I had turned on both lamps. After an hour or so, and a refill and shake of my CO2 bottles, I now have at least a dozen leaves giving off streams of oxygen bubbles. The plants seem to leave streams of bubbles where there is damage to a leaf, a hole or a tear or something like that. A lot of the other leaves are forming little bubbles on the underside of the leaves. It doesn’t look near as impressive, but it is still really cool.
I was worried that the fish where going to be really shy with the lights being so bright. But it doesn’t seem to be bothering them. A little food, and they are back to their normal, nippy, playful selves. My Pleco is even out right now “sunning” as I type this.
