diy vho lighting with moon light

I would like to start off with thank you to 3 reef and for all the help i have recieved just by reading all the threds avalible has helped me tremendusly

Well i decided to build a cost affordable reef lighting and studdying all the avalible options i decided to go with vho lighting for no other reason than cost for the parts types of lights avalible as well as diy retrofit part avalibility .. and i had some spair wood avalible and about 1000 blue leds just sitting here . so looking in the garage i had some 1x4 pine wood some aluminum angle iron and a sheet of lexon i started with a frame 48X13 1/2 with a pice of 1x6 for the front to cover the tank rim for my 90 gallon

i purchased a aro retrofit kit from e store witch included a vho-4lx ballast a plolished reflector 8 3 pice light fixtures and the nesisary harneses
ii used 9 led's for the moon light 3 strings of 3 with a 220 ohm resistor the put each string of 3 in paralell then i run them with a 12 volt 100ma wall transformer. on the inside of the wood frame i attached the small angle iron that would lator hold the lexon that i drilled for the led's i just used hot melt glue to hold led's and the associated wireing. on the back side of the wood frame i drilled 2 2 1/2 holes on both sides of the frame with a hole saw and then used a router with a corner round bit and oped the outside hole demention to 3 inches that will hold 1 3 inch fan from radioshack ont the other side will be the fresh air in

the top pice i just joined some extra wood i had laying arround and used the same corner round bit in my router to give the top a more finished look this is where i attached the light fixture and ran the wireing as best as i could and for those that are not so electrical savy keep the wireing as it came dont cut the wiring down to keep it tidy the wires need to be the same legnth so it wont arc and spark just bend them back arround and use some plastic p clamps to tidy your work .... the top pice will remain removeable so i can change the bulbs by unpluging the ballast and removeing the lid .. the bulb choices are from front to back 1 is 10k coralife 2 is uvi super actinic 3 is uvi actinic white 4 is another uvi super actinic

i will post up all the pictures of the build as soon as i get them uploaded you should be able to follow the build feel free to ask any qustions

 

im looking forward to see this build pictures! good job on tackling this DIY reef lighting project..

 

looks good bro! need to get some pics with it over the tank! k+

 

I love VHO lighting. Better then T5 IMO. Way cooler running too. Pic over tank x2.

 

The cat may interfere with the lights if he pees on them... I would remove the cat and replace him with a hamster in a cage

Just kidding. It looks great, bud!! Put 'em on and take a pic of the tank!

 

Very cool..

 

Well its on the tank now and everything seems to be going well i had lowered all my frags so far the coolest part witch is one of the main reasons for doing the project is my sun coral was dieing lost almost all the polips and it refused to eat for the last month has came out twice to eat first was 20 minuts after i added the light i never knew there was this mutch color in my frags i dont remember them looking this good at the LFS




i did some tempriture readings of the bulbs themselves first with the top just laying on the table out in open air ant thay were running 134 degrees after about an hour so i put them in the fixture once i put it all together on the tank and took a reading after several hours and found them to be running at 119 degrees so the cooling portion is working as planned i was a bit worried becose its sutch a tight area there is a pic of the hole tank sorry for the cheesy backround hopefuly the coraline will cover it within a year


and here is a pic of the night light its a bit dark in the pic camera is realy old


in all was a cool diy and i will definatly do to my future diy 180 gallon tank but i will set that one up with 4 ballast and 8 bulbs so i can set them on diffrent timers .