Aquapod 7051 lighting questions

[Lizpiper]

Hey everyone! I love your website and forum!
I'm kind of a total newbie, had my pod for about 10 months now. Its a reef with just a couple of fish, but the whole process has been so amazing I could never have imagined it - It's not just an aquarium, it's an ecosystem!

Anyway my question is stupid, even embarassing to ask! The pod comes with a 32w SunPaq dual daylight 6700k/10000k bulb, and a 32w SunPaq dual actinic bulb. According to the literature, it has "2 nocturnal blue lunar lights".
My dumb question is, which is the actinic light? The two bulbs in the blue light are of different colors, one lights up the whole tank with a bright blue light, and the other is slightly brighter than no light at all; it also uses a transformer on the power cord. There are three switches, but they don't correspond with the pictures on their website; i.e. they show the white light switch on the left and mine is in the middle.
I know the actinic light shouldn't be on all the time, and the lunar light can be, so I'd really like to set the timers correctly.

Thanks for all the helpful information!

[Ninong]

Hi Lizpiper,

That's a picture of your lighting setup. You have two 32w PC lamps. Each of those lamps is a dual lamp, meaning one side is a different Kelvin rating that the other. The daylight lamp has a 10,000K tube (white looking) and a 6700K tube (ivory looking). The actinic lamp has one side that looks blue (probably supposed to be 460 nm) and one side that looks lavendar (probably supposed to be 420 nm).

The white/ivory lamp is your daylight lamp. The blue/lavendar lamp is your actinic lamp. I guess you have two blue LEDs in there somewhere that they whimsically refer to as "lunar" lights.

I'm afraid I can't help you on your control panel switches.



If you have three separate switches, then you should have your actinic lamp come on about one-half hour to one hour before the daylight lamp and go off half an hour to an hour after the daylight lamp. You might want to run the actinic lamp 12 hrs/day and the daylight lamp 10 hrs/day.

How you use the "lunar" feature is up to you. It's really just a nightlight of sorts and not in any way a real lunar light. A real lunar light would match the moonrise and moonset cycles and mimic the varying intensity of the phases of the moon, which your little LEDs can't possibly accomplish. But they probably look nice at night if you want your show your tank to company. And as long as they're not so bright as to confuse the tank's inhabitants into thinking there's a full moon all night, every night, then I see no harm done.