Vivaria light and lighting at www.poison-frogs.com

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Vivarium - light

The lighting system forms a delicate balance between heat and light, secondly the light strength and spectrum is of importance for both plants and animals to feel good and stay healthy.

Fluorescent lights ( TL,PL type ) are preferable over standard light bulbs, from a perspective of light production versus heat production. Standard light bulbs produce a significant amount of heat, which makes it very difficult to control the temperature inside the hood and also the vivarium. Secondly the amount of light is insufficient, which requires even more lamps to cope with that. From the picture below one can see that especially the height of the vivarium is an important factor in the lighting.

Small vivaria ( less than 50 cm hight ) can do with limited lighting, although PL lights are still a preffered option , however if one increases the hight towards levels above 1 meter and further even HQL lamps become a necessity to create enough light on the bottom of the vivarium to sustain plant growth.
Energy / power requirements

As a rule of thumb 400 W of PL/TL light per square meter ( = 325 W per square Yard ) is a good amount of light for both heat and light. As a light source i use the Osram DULUX L 21 -840 36 W lamps. For my vivarium of 125 cm x 50 cm i have 7 of those lamps tightly packed in the hood ( 252 Watt ).

Note that the electricity usage of a standard house will increase significantly with 250 W which is operational for 10 hours per day ( + heating approximately 3 KWh per day power usage = 1000 KWh per year x 0,1 EUR = 100 EUR per year electricity costs for one vivarium !!!). This strengthens the message that starting a vivarium is not something to think about lightly. For me the lighting hours are from 11 in the morning to 12 at night. This is only a rule of thumb another way of calculating is to take notice of the fact that lamps usually give the amount of light they emit ( in Lumen ), Plants have light requirements in Lux, which are basically lumen per square meter. The fact that the light source emits to all angles results in the fact that the light strength reduces kwadratically with the distance, therefore high vivaria require a lot more light to have the same effect. In my large vivarium i used 14, 36 W, 2900 Lumen PL Lights. To improve the lighting on floor level i used parabolic mirrors behind the lamps to force the light down and prevent light dissipation. With this measures the mosses and ferns grow well on the bottom of the vivarium, otherwise it would have been a dead area.

As a function of light strength different plants can and will grow and do good in the vivarium. The highest light strength plants are the grey tillandsias, if one applies strong lighting like me these are the only plants that survive and do well in the warm and very light top area of the vivarium. IN the middle zone almost every common plant will do well, therefore orchids and green bromelaids will grow well too, without very thin light grey leaves. Red bromelaids require more light to stay red, therefore one could plant these at higher levels. At the bottom ferns and mosses can do well, although mosses canalso withstand quite high lighting circumstances. If your plants grow thin and are light coloured you have to increase the light strength to receive healthy plants again.

Light spectrum
Animals and some plant require a certain amount of UV light to live. The vivarium animals and plants require different amounts of UV light. Plants require mainly a lot of light, Tillandsias are capable to cope with lots of UV light, however other plants will burn under these conditions. Frogs ( and humans too ) require UVA light to create vitamin D out of the pro-vitamins in the food. If you dust the fruit flies with vitamin D, it is not required to use UV lamps in your set-up. Vitamin D will in combination with Calcium create a strong bone structure for your animals during growth, not having enough will result in rachitis.

I use a small 7 W OSRAM Radium Ralutec lamp for this purpose. The light production is of the UV type A.

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