DIY Metal Halide with t5 actinic!! pic heavy!!

Well i have started a new build 150 gallon cregslist find . being relitively new to the hobby i wanted to try halide lighting and with the sucsess of my vho project of my 90 gallon setup lets fire up the saws and my trusty old soldering station with the advice of a fiew fellow 3 reefers 3 250 watt halides should do the trick . i also wanted to have some actinics to mix in there for nothing more than dusk and dawn and 2 60"t5ho's should do the trick

so lets get started i had some m-58 core and coil ballast laying arround all i needed was a t5 ballast work hourse 7 will do ordered some spiderlight reflectors for the halides and i use a tek parabolic t5 i cut up to put in between the spiderlight reflectors probly net the best setup but with only 16 inches to work with i thaught it wasent sutch a bad idea mesurements are 72" wide 16" deep 8" tall i will be supporting it from my basement celing roughly 12" above the tank


without the protective glass installed . you can see the cut pices of the t5 reflectors


this was of some concern 4" fan 83 cfm i beleve but you will see in lator photos it works great


air inlet 2 2" holes rounded with a quarter round bit


wireing all tideyed up and i painted the entire inside with satin white to help with some of the reflectons


the ge core and coil as well as you can see how i affixed the t5 reflector protective glass is now installed witch also helps with the forced air cooling


VERRY IMPORTANT GROUND BONDING
something most diy projects seem to lack is the importance of ground bonding the core and coil has to be grounded as well as the capacitors along with the t5 ballast the green wireing the pic shows the grounding stratigy i used these capacitors can sore a large amount of voltage even with the unit off for hours in the neighborhood of 350 volts there cases need to be grounded as well as the socket stands with the least resistance methods bond the coil with the machine screw mounting tabs . gfi's wont protect you or your livestock without good bonding


finnaly in action there not at full brilliance but the 14k hamiltons have a nice color cant wait to see them on the tank in a couple weeks


after 6 hours of operation i am happy to seay the forced air cooling work well 107 degrees i can live with lets check elsewhere

103 on the glass probly not all that accurate and the wood case is not warm to the touch i measured 74 degrees roughly the same temp outdoors


so far was a fun project arround 400 dollars invested now just waiting for my actinic bulbs to show up sorry for the horible grammer and spelling

next diy i will be showing in a day or two is my 50 gallon sump mechanical filter fuge combo i completed this weekend as well and keep them diy projects comeing it keeps this hobby fun as well as affordable i love building my own eqipment

 

That looks like a well done job to me ,gt40425

400 bucks total spend seems very good value
and its a nice looking unit

what was on the tank prior to this? it would be cool to see images of tank under existing lighting and then again under this unit

Steve

 

Nice job!

 

i havent had this tank set up yet so i dont have any comparison . hopeing as time permits and funds are avalible it will be up and running in a month or so

 

lighting updates . i had to leak test the tank after repairs so i wanted to see how it turned out