Lights Project

Well, as of this morning, both new fish are still alive, whew! I haven't seen the goby much, he's basically been hiding under a rock. The cleaner shrimp is a bully - he's chased the peppermint shrimp out of his usual spot, and it's been hard to find the poor guy.

Not that this is totally exciting, but I've got pictures of the light installation that I did. I started out with basically a bare reflector and used a drill to make holes in the aluminum to mount the brackets on. You can see in this picture the metal halide socket (the big white socket) and the mounting clips for the compact fluorescent bulbs:

Close-up of the socket:

Instead of rivets, I decided to use small nuts and bolts to secure the socket and clamps in place. I have a pop riveter (from when I replaced my Mustang bumper), but after having to dremel off the other rivets, I decided it would be too much trouble if I ever wanted to disassemble this in the future. I don't know why they use rivets in the first place - maybe it's cheaper?

After all that was done, I installed the reflector into the canopy. I ended up bolting it in, since the canopy top is only 1/4" thick, and I really didn't trust having screws less than 1/4" deep holding $350 worth of lights in place. So I drilled all the way through the wood and used bolts to hold the reflector in place. It's not the prettiest solution, but you can't see them anyways, so I don't think it's a big deal.

Here's the reflector sitting in place:

Here I added some clamps to keep all the cords in place, so that they wouldn't accidentally touch another bulb or the water:

And here's the canopy back on the tank with the lights in place - bright!

I actually had a lot of fun doing this, and it didn't take very long to do. The next project will be to install a pair of fans in there, because the metal halide bulb puts out a lot of heat.

And just for fun, here's a picture of all the pets hanging out by the fire: