What kind of lighting will my aquarium plants need?

What kind of lighting will my aquarium plants need?

Marc Grover (Professional Aquarist) gives expert video advice on: What plants are best for my freshwater aquarium?; How do I choose a healthy plant for my aquarium?; What kind of lighting will my aquarium plants need? and more...

When you are doing a full planted aquarium, the light requirements can be intense. Typically, people go between three and five watts per gallon. The other critical area is typically the color temperature. Daylight is 5500 degrees Kelvin. It looks great to plants, but it doesn't look so good to the naked eye. It's very yellow when you are looking at an aquarium. What I tell people to do is a combination of things. Get into the 5500, 6500 Kelvin range and then add some red, if you can, and then tint it blue, which is a much higher spectrum in color temperature. 7700, 9000, 10,000 Kelvin, the higher the Kelvin rating the more white or blue the light is, and the lower the Kelvin rating is the more yellow it tends to look. You have to give the plant what it needs but you also don't want a yellow looking aquarium. You want it to look as natural as possible to your eye, so you want to cover all of those spectrums.