"Tristan" wrote in message ...
I am a cheapskaaate when it comes to paying what they want for
lights. I prefer to make my own or at least the hood and buy a retro
kit. If yur good at DIY and can make a suitable hood, adding in retro
fit parts and yur old lights would be cheapest, and would fill that 3
x 96 watt criteria you mentioned, and probably still have room for a
few tubes of T5...

The problem with DIY projects is that I have too many of these open...
I am terrible in terms of closing what I started working on :-)
That is why I would recently rather buy a lamp which is ready to plug in.

On reefcentral.com they recommend going with T5 made by Tek.
Anybody here uses this fixture maybe ? Any opinions ?

The goldfish and smallkoi tank at the local Deathco store here has a
light over it that I would love to have. Its certainly overkill for a
koi and goldfish tank. It has an aluminum extrusion housing, and is
suspended on acrylic tubes from an overhead framework of polished
aluminum.....tank itself is perhaps 36 x 36 x 30 inches and its all
acrylic...The light has 8 T5 tubes as well as 2 175 MH lights in it, 4
fans and 6 moon lights and is anodized a bronze color. No name on it,
and from the looks it was part of the display that has the base and
tank assembly with overhead support for light.....The entire setup
would be a cool reef tank.........but just for having koi and common
goldies on display to sell inthe store, what a waste of money.

Yes, it sounds like an overkill, but they want to present expensive koi good.