T5 lighting questions

[Delphinus]

Ok so I guess it helps if I get my facts straight. Just looked at the ballast and it's 4 leads not 6. So to wire up 8 lamps I could go with one lead to each set of 2 lamps, or do them all in series with all 4 lamps leads wired together. Would there be a difference? I'm leaning towards doing 4 sets of two.

I see what you're saying about doing 4 lamps on 2 ballasts but this is just to get me going for now. I might add more ballasts down the road and/or more lamps depending on how tight it is up there with everything. It bears mention that this is supplemental lighting anyhow, the main lights are 3 * 400w Radiums. I am going for a dusk/dawn effect with the t5's and hoping for a wee bit of coral fluorescing much like what I had when I had my old 75g going. Back then I ran 110w URI VHO actinics and I really liked those. I've heard that t5 actinics aren't as good as the old VHO actinics and so far when I ran t5's on my smaller tanks I haven't found an actinic that was as strong as those, but there are more choices available.

Anyhow I don't know if I want to go with all actinics or even super blues for that matter seeing as the Radiums are already pretty blue and I don't really want to go for a discotheque blue theme on the tank, so I might go for a mixture of lamps with maybe half of them being either blue or actinic and then something else for the other 4.

As for the starts .. I bought these sockets that are shunted which I thought were better for the Workhorse ballasts with whatever starting mechanism those ballasts use? I don't really understand the nitty-gritty details but if it's better to replace the ballast down the road with something else, I can look at that, but for now I'm sort of mandated of using what I already have in my packrat pile and making it work.