Ideas for lighting a 37 Gallon

[travis442]

Yep that is the one that I was looking at and will probably go with the Bulb suggestion from grim reefer as well.

Now I'm all excited to get everything put together and be done with this Eclipse hood and finally add some more coral.

 

[james3370]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=14975488#post14975488 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by travis442
That sounds good to me, at this point I'm really leaning towards going with that kit and building my canopy. Of course it will be a little bit different than your probably a little simpler without the sliding light shelf.

And going that way will give me the ability to like you said upgrade the ballast in the future if I find a good deal and get a little better light output from the same light which would be much harder to do with a fixture.

One question I do have though is how do you connect the fans? What are you plugging them into? Are you wiring them into the ballast so that when the lights are on the fans are too?

Do you have room in your canopy to put six lights if you really wanted to or is that cutting it pretty close?

Thanks for you input on everything.

each bulb takes 2.5", so not enough room in 12" width for 6 of them. 5 would fit, but i think it'd be a bit overkill for the addl bulb.

for the fans, the simplest way to power it is to get one of these power supplies. it has the molex plug that will plug right into the pc fan. i have 1 of them & have put (4) 120mm fans on it & ran them just fine. you could also take a regular old wall wart & cut the plug off & splice it to the fan if ya wanted. might be a tad bit cheaper, but the way i look at it, if a fan goes bad for some reason, it would be alot easier to just unplug it & plug in another one instead of having to re-splice another one


for the timing, i'd just plug the power supply into the same timer as either the daylights of the actincs

 

[travis442]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=14975719#post14975719 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by james3370
each bulb takes 2.5", so not enough room in 12" width for 6 of them. 5 would fit, but i think it'd be a bit overkill for the addl bulb.

for the fans, the simplest way to power it is to get one of these power supplies. it has the molex plug that will plug right into the pc fan. i have 1 of them & have put (4) 120mm fans on it & ran them just fine. you could also take a regular old wall wart & cut the plug off & splice it to the fan if ya wanted. might be a tad bit cheaper, but the way i look at it, if a fan goes bad for some reason, it would be alot easier to just unplug it & plug in another one instead of having to re-splice another one


for the timing, i'd just plug the power supply into the same timer as either the daylights of the actincs

Thats cool I wasn't sure how much space each bulb took so I wasn't sure if you would be able to fit more or not. For the molex plug that you showed how were you able to hook up four of them did you find a molex splitter? It looked like that power supply only had 1 connection.

Yeah plugging into into the timer would be the simplest solution and I agree just unplugging it would be a lot simpler than having to unwire it.

 

[james3370]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=14975771#post14975771 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by travis442
Thats cool I wasn't sure how much space each bulb took so I wasn't sure if you would be able to fit more or not. For the molex plug that you showed how were you able to hook up four of them did you find a molex splitter? It looked like that power supply only had 1 connection.

Yeah plugging into into the timer would be the simplest solution and I agree just unplugging it would be a lot simpler than having to unwire it.

the fans i have there is a male & female molex on each fan, so they daisy-chain off each other from the PS

 

[travis442]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=14975841#post14975841 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by james3370
the fans i have there is a male & female molex on each fan, so they daisy-chain off each other from the PS

I didn't think about that, definitely the easiest way to do it though. I might add two fans and see how that works out to keep the temp down.

 

[james3370]

just make sure however many you do that they are blowing INWARD. fans blowing outward will die quick from the humid salty air going thru them corroding them

 

[travis442]

Yeah that is something that I wouldn't have thought about. Blowing inward would be fine anyways if I am going to drill a couple of holes in the top of the canopy anyways.