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I recently built my own light strip for a 55 gal aquarium and I
thought I'd share my plans. I had two goals: lots of light, little money. Time to completion was about three hours. The materials have extra left over: the gutter only comes in 10' lenghts, so it is enough to make two strip lights, and I only used 1' of aluminum flashing, so I have 9 additional feet left over. The materials can be found at any hardware stores, but I found the lowest price on screw-in compact fluorescent lamps at Sam Walton's store. Materials: 10' vinyl gutter (white) $6 Two gutter end caps 4 10' extension cord 3 3xdouble light socket (screw-base) 9 Spray paint, textured black 5 Aluminum flashing, 12"x10' 7 6x20W, 65k screw-in flourescents 30 Misc screws, pop-rivets 5 ----- $69 Tools: Wire cutters/strippers Pliers Hand saw Drill Sand paper (optional) Screw driver Pop-rivet tool (optional) A few construction tips: - I used pop-rivets to fix the end caps in the gutter, but #6x3/8" screws would work fine. - Disassemble the light sockets and replace the screws holding the socket together with #6x 1 3/4" machine screws. - Make reflectors out of 4"x12" pieces of aluminum flashing. I tried without reflectors, but the gutter got fairly hot. Use a couple of nuts on the machine screws as spacers between the reflectors and the gutter. - I used fairly 'fancy' black spray paint that has sand to give it a textured finish. To give the paint a better surface to adhere to, I lightly sanded the gutter surface. - The gutter was still warm to the touch, so I drilled ventilation holes through the vinyl, but over the reflectors so that light doesn't leak out. With only these holes, my tank stays at 80-82 F when the room is 76 F, so fan cooling is unnecessary. |
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