# Lighting Options for Aquastart 320 Tank



## BettaNard (Jan 27, 2016)

Hi guys,

I currently have a 28 Litre (Approx 7.5 Gallon) AquaOne Aquastart 320 tank.


*Light Details*

The light it comes with is an 11W Dual Spectrum PL Bulb. One rod is 7100k White light, the other rod is 8000k red light. The whole unit is built into the hood which is *removable*. It's a 2 pin connection which is 24cm long including the pins

With 11W this equates to around 1.5 Watts per gallon. Which, to me is not much. I've recently started looking into carpet plants. 
I've bought HC Cuba by accident, not realising it's very hard to grow without CO2. So I'll be looking into easier carpet plants later down the track. I do have Lilaeopsis in there which is doing OK but probably could do better. I need better lighting so it penetrates down to the bottom of my tank. Also, my tank is slowly becoming heavily planted, so I'm going to need a stronger light.

So I'm looking for alternatives here. Looking at the Aquaone spare parts webpage, all the replacement bulbs are 11W, there are 18W bulbs but they won't fit my tank as they're designed to fit the Aquastart 500 and other bigger tanks than mine.

Is there some other branded bulbs with higher wattage that will fit in here? Or should I completely remove the hood and get a light unit that sits on top? The only thing is that the grey borders around the edges of the top of my tank, might make it hard for a light unit to clip on and I'm not sure I can remove the grey plastic border so that it's just all glass edges at the top.

Posting pictures up now.





































And how my planted tank looks:


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## BettaNard (Jan 27, 2016)

Just for some further info, I found out that these bulbs are compact T5 tubes if that helps.


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## BettaNard (Jan 27, 2016)

Bump


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