• Properly lighting an aquarium can go a long way toward keeping your fish healthy and happy.aquarium fish 4 image by cherie from Fotolia.com
  
  Aquariums can add a natural beauty to any home or office, especially if they're properly maintained. Part of basic aquarium care is ensuring that the properly lighting is used, and luckily, for many aquariums, only basic lighting is required.
  
  

Types of Lighting

• When selecting the proper lighting for your aquarium, you'll be faced with various options when it comes to bulbs: standard fluorescent, metal halide, compact fluorescent, high output and very high output fluorescent, and LED lighting. The most basic type of lighting, with which most freshwater fish will be perfectly comfortable, is standard fluorescent. This type of lighting uses long bulbs that glow with a light purple/white light and typically provide the required lighting for most aquarium applications.
  
  

Fish Only or Plants?

• The type of lighting you'll need vastly depends on what's actually in the tank and how much water there is. If you're only keeping freshwater fish, they'll be fine with low-wattage standard fluorescent lighting as stated in Section 1. However, if you're keeping plants, you may need to upgrade your lighting. The light must be able to penetrate the depth of the tank as well as provide enough light for the plants to undergo photosynthesis. As a general rule of thumb, when keeping live plants, the wattage of your light (the wattage will be listed on the light's packaging) should be about 2 to 5 watts per gallon of water.
  
  

Light Cycles

• When you've finally picked out your light, you'll now need to determine the proper cycle periods. Most aquariums should have the light on 10 to 12 hours per day, so turn the lights on during the day and then off before you go to bed. However, if the tank is in direct sunlight, you may experience substantial algae buildup, which can be circumvented by daily algae scrapes (taking an abrasive algae pad and wiping it off the inside of the tank). You may want to invest in a dimming switch so that you can gradually increase the brightness of the light; gradually lighting the aquarium in the mornings and dimming it at night can simulate the sun cycles, creating a more naturalistic environment for your fish.