What lighting for my 29 gallon planted tank?

More light = faster growth = more CO2 = faster nutrient uptake

Unless you want to prune/harvest a lot, I'd suggest using the minimum light necessary to suit your eye.

I would buy a $10 shop light and paint the outside black, but that's just me.

If you want something more professional looking, I think the low-end Coralife fixtures are pretty decent for the price...but I hate the gold anodizing, so I paint them black too.

Remember, the smaller dia. bulbs cost a LOT more than the good old fashioned T12s. Of course, they also use a lot less energy, but there's a trade-off for everything.

 

Dont' judge lights by "watts per gallon". That was never a very good criteria, and is worthless today with so many light types available. You need a light that gives adequate intensity at the substrate level under the bulb, with enough and long enough bulbs to get that adequate intensity over the entire substrate. T5HO bulbs are likely to be to bright for a standard 29 gallont tank, which is 18 inches high, unless you suspend them a foot or so above the top of the tank. Doing that is actually a good idea, because it also makes the light intensity much more uniform from top to bottom of the tank, and it allows the light from a single bulb to spread out so it better covers the whole footprint of the tank. Since a 29 gallon tank is only 12 inches from front to back, a single T5HO light suspended above the tank can cover the whole tank well. A one bulb, 24" T5HO fixture, with the typical great highly polished aluminum reflector would be a very good choice, in my opinion, but not the only good choice.

If you have reasonable woodworking or metal working skills you can make a very nice suspended light fixture, allowing you to raise and lower it to adjust the level of lighting, and with the looks that go well with the rest of your furnishings. Here is one way to do that: Another Light Fixture??

 

One problem with 29 gallon tanks (16 inches tall) is that the three bulb reflectors of T12 or T8 fluorescent tubes (20/18 watt) don't get enough light to the mid-level and bottom of the tank.

What starts at about 1700 lux 5 inches below the surface drops to about 900 lux 10 inches down and to 500 at the bottom, using broad spectrum "sunlight" bulbs.

1500 lux is considered the minimum for most upright plants, although some low light plants can do with less.

More watts will penetrate further, but without CO2 they will cause a mess.

Good luck.

Bill

 

The photo of the Catalina fixture doesn't show the reflector, but it is likely to be much like that in the Nova fixture. And, that isn't nearly as good a reflector as we normally see in a T5HO fixture. That is the good news. If the fixtures had the usual, single tube, highly polished, reflectors, they would be much too much light for a 29 gallon tank, but with the single, basically flat reflector used in the Nova fixture, you might not have too much light. I suggest you hang the fixture above the tank so you can adjust its height, and control the intensity and uniformity of the lighting that way.