Lighting

A buddy of mine has a 72 gallon corner bowfront that he has had for about two and a half years. Like all of the corner aquariums, lighting them properly can be tricky. His is particularly difficult as this aquarium has a flat back making it rather long, skinny, and tall. There is not much room is place lights and yet it has to be bright enough to punch to the bottom of his aquarium.

What he had been using with some success was several T12-VHO lamps. He had two 3' 95 watt lamps in the ...

O.K. so it's like this..
I had a close friend make me a BAD *** three piece hood for my display...
I love it and I know I couldn't have made it as light but sturdy as he did..
Well there's one problem, the lights are to low to the water..
He made it to MY specs as asked.. but this was my mis-calculation on the spread of Lumenbright reflectors.. They are kind like a spot light and I had a dark "V" in the middle of my tank...
So I decided to mod the hood and ...

Recently, Ive started making changes to my reef to make it more energy efficient. I made the choice to remove my CL system and use powerheads. I opened up my aquascaping and thinned out some large acroporas to get away with less over all flow, and most recently I changed the lighting schedule on my MH's to help reduce the heat generated by three 400 watters over a seven hour period.
For years Ive ran my VHO's for 13 hours and my MH's for seven and have had great results. I have always had ...

20k MH mounted over the tank now... I like enough I'm going to keep it - kind of. I'm going to drop down to a 14k and then add a couple 2' T5 actinics.



I restacked the rock, much better now as I have some great ledges for coral (might not be clear in the picture.) I also have plenty of room for the rock from the old tank that I'll start moving over in a week or two.

There's nothing more I love than a practical DIY on the cheap. Actually, what I think I love more is putting all the odds and ends saved from where ever to good use. And over the years, not saving odds and ends from various projects or broken equipment usually leads to a trip to a hardware store. In my basement, I'll admit to a couple of coolers full of PVC fittings, a broken protein skimmer, odd lengths of airline, scraps of plexi-glass and I don't want to know how many linear feet of pipe and ...