40 GALLON TANK TAKE 1!!!!!

Lookin good! I started wiring the lights I bought from you last night...

Those T5 ballasts, where they are mounted, which side of the canopy is that, exactly? Or, do you have a full-canopy shot?

Thanks!
-JD

Neat freak! Besides being neat and tidy looking good.... now lets see some light! :)

Thanks guys... JD, if you're looking at the tank, the T5 ballasts are on the right side. I didn't have any left-handed ballasts, so I had to put them on that end which means that I had to rearrange some other stuff to fit them there.



Ok, I'm kidding. They can go anywhere you want. :)

Dave, I'm aiming to have the whole hodge-podge installed this afternoon. I just weighed everything on a scale at work. The entire canopy is just under 50 pounds. I'm hoping that a whole mess of drywall anchors are going to hold it! lol

Pics and maybe a video of the light mover to come!

It looks really great, Eric! I am excited to see the whole set-up together! (And video? You are too good to us...) :)

Everything is mounted and working for the most part. I don't have something to plug some of the lights into the timer, so I'm manually working them for now. I also need to wire the fans. More to come!

01/11/07

Woohoo! Progress! I got the canopy mounted above the tank and the 9 drywall anchors (3 different kinds) managed to hold up the 50 pound canopy. 2 of the anchors are the wing-type anchors that are in the metal studs, so I think that I'm going to be good. Everything is fired up and running, but I don't have everything on timers just quite yet. That'll be my minor project for tomorrow I think. The T5 all work and are BRIGHT BRIGHT BRIGHT!!! The halide on the light mover works and it's amazing how much brighter the 4x39W T5s are than the 150W halide. I'm using 2x54W program start ballasts on the T5 bulbs. Not sure if they're being overdriven though. Things went off pretty much without a hitch, and I even installed it by myself for the most part. The cleanup crew arrives tomorrow. Unfortunately, I'm not terribly sure if there's really much for them to clean up at this point. The tank has been running for 2 weeks. More water tests on Monday.

Here's a picture of the door mounted to the canopy. I was working on it on the floor of my office at this point. I only used 1 of the support brackets because it seems to be fine by itself. I'm not real thrilled with how far it keeps the front open, but it'll work. I hopefully won't need to get in there terribly often. I can access the tank for feedings and light maintenance without opening it because the bottom of the canopy is 5.5" off of the tank. (The width of a 2x6)

http://ericfeige.com/gallery/albums/...1/canopy12.jpg

Here's a picture of the canopy sitting on the 2x6's while I drilled holes through the back so I knew where the anchors were going...

http://ericfeige.com/gallery/albums/...1/canopy13.jpg

This may be the coolest picture that I took, and it was just a quick picture. Shows the surface agitation, and the water disappearing into the overflow and the lights and stuff...

http://ericfeige.com/gallery/albums/...1/canopy14.jpg

Here's a picture of the T5 bulbs fired up when they are in the flipped-up "access the tank" position...

http://ericfeige.com/gallery/albums/...1/canopy15.jpg

And here's a picture of everything all together. The picture is rather blurry though. I'll bring in my good camera one of these days maybe and snap some decent ones...

http://ericfeige.com/gallery/albums/...1/canopy16.jpg

And for the curious, I made an animated gif of the light mover moving the halide back and forth... :) It takes about a minute to move the light from one end to the other.

http://perpetualproducts.com/images/agramover.gif

And if you're REALLY bored, you can see the 2 minute or so long video of the pendant moving back and forth here:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZCnrcI32aw]Video...[/ame]

The big 'ol crash that you hear at the beginning is me knocking the cordless drill over on my desk. The camera picks up all sorts of ambient sound and it sounds like a car hit the building, but it was nothing like that.

That looks AWESOME! Great job bro! I'm impressed. And, Yeah, I bet that is ALOT of light!

Omigosh Eric - it is AMAZING!!!

lmao! How many watts per gallon is that? if each t5 is 54 and then the 150 halide you have 9.15 watts per gallon..........4 is perfect lol and ur at over double that.........omg cant wait to see some acro's in that thing and how they turn out.

SHOWOFF!!! But it is show worthy!