From plumber to electrician........
A big pile of boxes showed up yesterday from UPS with all the lighting components. It was just like Christmas. The first thing was to figure out how to position everything. The AGA 180g has 2 cross-braces at the top, leaving 3 equally sized openings. The MH's are centered over these. I mounted each reflector to the 1x4 using a stack of washers to create an air gap between the reflector and the wood. Maybe this wasn't necessary, but it makes me feel better to have the hot metal away from the wood.
The 150W MH's are from a retrofit electronic ballast kit from hellolights.com. Their service and packaging were fantastic. Everything arrived in perfect condition. They even threw in a "freebie" which was actually something useful. If you order from them, call on the phone. They threw in some extra cable at no extra cost.
Once the 3 MH reflectors were in place it was time to position the T-5's. This is a 4x39W Tek retrofit kit from reefgeek.com. Again, I was very happy with the service and the packaging was even better than hellolights'. A phone call was also a good idea here, since I needed to make sure the cables would be long enough. They supplied plenty.
The rat's nest of cables was a bit daunting at first. It really paid off to label everything which simplified hooking up the ballasts later.
I constructed a small shelf inside the cabinet to get the big MH ballasts up off the floor. I used tons of plastic wire brackets to keep things organized. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
The three electronic MH ballasts are on the shelf and the two T-5 electronic ballasts are mounted to the back wall. After all this it was time to see if I got smoke or light........ Voila, to my surprise, everything lit perfectly on the first try.
You can see from the photo that there is a little light spillage out of the canopy top, but it isn't that noticable in person. You can also see that more of the driftwood is now sunken. At this point, the few pieces that are still floating will be easily held down by some rockwork. The release of tannins is still occurring, but at a much slower pace now.
The 20 lb CO2 cylinder is in place and I'm just waiting for the regulator now. Next on the agenda...... connecting the remaining Eheim 2217, installing one more power strip, configuring the timers, installing the black background, adding one final bag of Ecco complete (12 total), scouting around for some good rocks, installing the 105g reservoir in the room behind, giving everything a good cleaning, and...... finally......doing a little scaping.
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