Easy and cheap moon lights

jacksonpt

jacksonpt

New member
I'm sure some of you have thought of this, but for those who haven't...

An easy and cheap solution for moon lights is LED rope lights. I got a 6' strand at Loews for $6. They are indoor/outdoor and certainly seem to be waterproof enough.
 
got any pics of them lighting up the tank at night? would love to see how they do. and for 6 bucks man cant beat that.
 
Also, could you link to the item on lowes.com? I am not finding anything fitting that description, especially not at that price? It wasn't on clearance was it?
 
I couldn't find them on the lowes site, otherwise I would have linked to it. I did some general googling trying to find the item, and could only find this, a 48' strand of the same thing at Amazon.

Anyways, what I bought is by a company called Utilitech. It's an indoor/outdoor linkable rope light. They had it in 6 and 25' lengths, in blue and white. I wanted the blue, but they didn't have blue in the 6'. It was in the section with accessory lighting - the stick up undercabinet lights, the LED lights, etc.

I'll see what I can do for a picture.
 
You'll start seeing them everywhere very soon in with the Christmas stuff. I used blue ones for my moon lights for about a year. Worked very well, but I don't have any pics, sorry. It's not real bright, but you can pretty well see what's going on in the tank.
 
MrRyanT said:
You'll start seeing them everywhere very soon in with the Christmas stuff. I used blue ones for my moon lights for about a year. Worked very well, but I don't have any pics, sorry. It's not real bright, but you can pretty well see what's going on in the tank.
Click to expand...

Good point - once the christmas decorations hit stores, they'll be all over, but I'm not sure how long those strands will be. I've got a 3' tank, so the 6' length worked perfectly for me.

And I think the blue would be a better option. I got the white and they are pretty yellow, but work well enough for me, especially for $6.
 
I had a really hard time getting a remotely decent picture in such low light. The lights aren't this red in person, but hopefully this will give you a sense of how bright they are.

moonlights.jpg
 
go to home depot, I was trying to solve this problem and found super cheap rope lights, they light up the water perfectly at night, its amazing, if I had a camera I would take a picture, I got the 18' blue lights. its a good deal.
 
Alright, this is a great way to make moonlights. Go to your local auto parts store. Most of them sell LEDs these days. You can buy a 6 pack for like 5 bucks. Blue look this best, IMO. Buy as many as you want and take a strip of 1/4 plywood and drill holes just smaller than the leds, wherever you want to place them. The LEDs will stick out of the plywood and all they will holding by is the solid wire at the base of the LED, because the strip of wood will be screwed to the inside of your canopy after you wire it. The nice thing about doing it this way is you can point them wherever you want, like at certain rock structures or corals. Wire all the pos. together and all the neg. together and connect to a cell phone charger or other dc converter you have laying around.
Heres my first reef tank, I built this in like 2 hrs. I am no expert but I have this in my new tank 2 years later and and they still look amazing.
 
So a quick look at walmart, the new LED Christmas lights look promising, though this early in the year their selection was limited.
The random twinkle feature could be cool too, but couldnt find any blue ones yet, they had alot of empty shelf space at this point, but
they were all 6-12 bucks, hell yea,hope i can find what i want later this season.
 
I used for my moon lights was Ground effect lights for your car or truck. I had some on my truck and took them off and wired them up to my tank.

This is what it looks like at night.
<Left>
<a href="http://s11.photobucket.com/albums/a165/xxxSobedragonxxx/MY%20REEF/?action=view&current=CIMG5217.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a165/xxxSobedragonxxx/MY%20REEF/CIMG5217.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a><br /><br />
</left>

and this is what it looks like in my canopy. It's the strip towards the top thats kinda sagging a little.
<Left>
<a href="http://s11.photobucket.com/albums/a165/xxxSobedragonxxx/MY%20REEF/?action=view&current=CIMG5514.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a165/xxxSobedragonxxx/MY%20REEF/CIMG5514.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a><br /><br />
</left>
 
EdSnyder said:
Alright, this is a great way to make moonlights. Go to your local auto parts store. Most of them sell LEDs these days. You can buy a 6 pack for like 5 bucks. Blue look this best, IMO. Buy as many as you want and take a strip of 1/4 plywood and drill holes just smaller than the leds, wherever you want to place them. The LEDs will stick out of the plywood and all they will holding by is the solid wire at the base of the LED, because the strip of wood will be screwed to the inside of your canopy after you wire it. The nice thing about doing it this way is you can point them wherever you want, like at certain rock structures or corals. Wire all the pos. together and all the neg. together and connect to a cell phone charger or other dc converter you have laying around.
Heres my first reef tank, I built this in like 2 hrs. I am no expert but I have this in my new tank 2 years later and and they still look amazing.
Click to expand...
Whoops. Meant to post this link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7nnKzaBZk8&feature=player_profilepage#
 
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