Well it has been awhile since I posted but I have been busy working my 3 or 4 or 5 jobs. Always busy working. Here is a little update.
Well Mark, I was really wanting to keep my temp, lighting costs and electricity down so I decided to try using just two 250watt metal halides with T5 supplementation. And to get what I need out of two 250 watt halide bulbs I chose to use the lumenarc(square) reflector and the xm 10k bulbs for thier high par. Hopefully with the two of them it will be plenty of light for my tank. I can always add an additional metal halide if needed.
For the T5's I went with four 3 foot T5 double lamp fixtures from Sunlight Supply. Each fixture with a Giesemann PowerChrome Actinic+ 39watt and a Giesemann PowerChrome Pure Actinic 39watt. For a total of 312 watts of light from the T5's.
I built a light rack out of aluminum myself. Some of it was built while working at the fire station.
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Now what I did not take into consideration was the height of the metal halide bulb inside the reflector. I built the rack so that the T5's were about 5 inches fromt he metal halide. But with the added height of the bulb in the reflector my halide bulb ends up being 18 inches off the top of the water. So I need to rebuild my light rack and I plano on just mounting the T5's right under the reflectors with no distance between them.
To hang I used some rope, pullies, carabiners and hooks. When I rebuild the rack and get my heights figured I will tie a couple of butterfly knots in the end to hang on the hook. One at the operating level and then the second at the point where the rack is at highest possible for working inside the tank.
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As you can see in the last two pics, one of the T5 arms is just sitting on the light rack. I had trouble with some of rivets holding so I am planning on replacing all with nuts and bolts when I do the rebuild.