|| 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.

Great job... now... take some pics and post them in the binaries group or on
your own website for the world to learn from your excellent process....

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