In need of enlightment.

[SeaFish]

I have a 50 gallon acrylic tank with a dimension of 36in x 15in x 20in made by Clear For Life. The acrylic tank has a bridge brace in the middle of the tank about 3inch wide (it came standard with acrylic tank, i am guessing its there to support the tank's structrual integrity).

 

I have a 250 watt metal halide lamp with a 20k Radium bulb. I want to keep mostly soft corals, lps corals, and maybe a few sps and one or two clams. The clams and sps when i do get them will be placed either at the middle or top of the aquarium. The light itslef will be mounted about 9 inchs off the surface of the water with a acrylic brace on the tank directly under lighting.

 

I was wondering if this 250 watt metal halide is enough for what i want to keep in my tank and what i want to do?

[skeletor]

You could put your softies down one end of the tank and hard corals/clams at the other, then run the light over them. The softies should get more than enough light..

 

-skeletor-

[ELGORDOINAVW]

be careful with mounting your light over the brace i've seen pictures of people who have done the same. basically what happens is the light/heat concentrates over the brae with time you'll see little cracks or bubbles in the plastic, which could end up ruining the center brace. all in all you'll end up putting too much strain on the joints in the tank. go with 2x175 mh you'll be happy and that way you can put your sps/lps near the top and softies at the bottom. cheers-

[MrConclusion]

It also depends a lot on what reflector design you end up with. Some reflectors will deliver more light from a 250 watt bulb than another reflector will deliver from a 400 watt. What you want is a highly-polished and well-focused reflector to put more of the bulb's light into the aquarium, and less into the hood or the rest of the room.

 

PFO hoods (The are often cross-marketed with IceCap) are particularly well designed, they have 4 different reflector designs and as you would expect, the more you pay the more efficient they are. However, the IceCap spiderlight wide-parabola reflectors are much more inefficient.