Gutting out light fixture?

J

Johnie_West

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I have a 48" MH and PC light fixture with lunar lights. I want to add a canopy to my tank but can't put this fixture inside a canopy. Can I gut out the fixture and mount everything inside the canopy as a retro fit kit? It has HQI DE bulbs so will I have to get a new fixture and glass shield for those? I'm sure someone has done this before. This would be a good time to upgrade my PC ballasts.
 
It can be done. I doubt you will be able to use the reflectors because I'm guessing the glass shield slides onto the hood and not the refectors. It will be a lot easier if the halide ballasts are external and electronic and not magnetic. My old AB hood had magnetic ballasts inside the hood and there were 3 different parts to each ballast. I would have had to buy some kind of box to keep them in if I wanted them external.

If you decide to install them in your hood, you might want to think about going with T5's instead of PC's. It will cost more since you will have to buy new ballasts, but your bulb choices would be much greater. I went from a hood with metal halides/PC's to one with metal halides and T5's and I'm much happier with the T5's.
 
The glass shields do slide on to the fixture. I figured I would have to replace the reflectors. The MH ballasts though are external. I have the dual 250 from Galaxy. As far as the PC's I was looking in to some VHO retro kits with the Icecap 660 ballast. I guess I'm not sure what the difference is between T5 and VHO. I still have to figure something out for the lunar lights as well.
 
If you are looking at vho then I would definately look into T5's. They run cooler and as I said, there are more bulb choices. I'm running 2 blues, 1 actinic and 1 purple T5 along with my 14k phoenix halide bulbs and I really like the color.
 
I see the VHO have more watts than the T5's and are around the same price for a retro kit. The cooler bulbs would probably work best for me since I do have 2 250 MH already. Thanks for all the tips!
 
@Johnie_West wrote:
I see the VHO have more watts than the T5's and are around the same price for a retro kit. The cooler bulbs would probably work best for me since I do have 2 250 MH already. Thanks for all the tips! said:
That's misleading as far as vho having more watt's. While it's true if you are just looking at numbers but, the T5's have more PAR per watt and penetrate deeper than any VHO bulb. You can visit the T5 thread on reefcentral for a lot of info.

Cheers,
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You'd probably be better off selling your fixture and buying what you want/need to go into the canopy via retro kits or individual reflectors etc. Since this is going into a canopy, I would take the opportunity to do two things, go SE instead of DE as heat will be quite a bit less and utilize T-5 supplementation instead of VHO. I will say that there are some who definitely like the VHO actinics more that T-5, but if you want more color options, ie Blue/Purple etc T-5 is the way to go.

Putting together a lighting system in the canopy using this method would be a lot easier than tearing a fixture apart in my opinion plus you will probably get much better components, ie ballasts, reflectors etc than you would with a fixture.
 
i would agree with daveJ it would be a better idea to go with a retro fit kit. Also SE bulbs you dont need a uv shield so you dont have to worry about glass. I like my VHOs but dave is right about a better color chose with t5s
 
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