Tank Background: To Paint or Not to Paint?

the back will be covered in coralline in a few months so in the end does it matter?

I was GOING to paint the back of my tank! I won't be doing it now and I'm glad I read this article before I did it.

.. I as well run mh's. but the concepts of reflection/refraction are the same. yes the wavelengths are different, their behavior I would suspect would be the same.

they said they contemplated testing led's but they use optic lens to direct light down to avoid the loss of light through the glass.(like the reflectors in t5 lights) I believe they were also recommending no one paint there glass no matter what lights you use if your trying to keep light in your tank.

T5 lights just need it more then most because the bulbs are round and the light goes everywhere without reflectors.

If you look at the graphs and the example they showed they said the light goes through the glass and bounces of the outer part of the Paine of glass and more of it escapes when it's painted for some reason.

we tracked down physics professor Brain Lane, looking for a possible explanation. As he explained, in simple terms, when light leaves its source and hits the panes of glass in the tank, some of that light escapes through the glass, but some is reflected off the inner surface of the glass and heads back into the tank. As strange as it might sound, some of the light also reflects off the inner "surface" of the outer side of the glass pane, too (see the figure below). However, apparently having something "sealed" against the glass, such as blue paint or a wetted blue plastic background stops some of the light from reflecting off the inner surface of the outer side of the glass pane. If anything else was going on, taping the dry plastic background on the tank would have the same effect - but it didn't.