Rain Gutter Hoods

(click on any photo to view a larger image)

     The cheap lights that came with my 120 gallon aquarium were entirely inadequate for the live plants I was adding.  The tank was exactly the same length as the 72" fluorescent bulbs (including end caps), so my initial attempt at designing my own hood revolved around buying a ballast and installing it atop a pair of brown (matches the stand) plastic rain gutters that was cut to the length of my tank.  The ballast has four mounting holes through which I simply drilled the plastic and bolted the ballast to the top of the gutters.

The gutters were aligned with their flat (back) sides touching.  The plastic mounts were attached to these flat sides by screwing into them from the outside of the hood (before placing them together). 
The wires from the ballast were run along the flat sides between the two hoods and thus were hidden from view when the two hoods were joined together.

The end caps (bought with the gutters) were installed over the end of each hood.  The electrical cord was run through a hole drilled through one cap with a small rubber grommet to keep the cord's insulation from rubbing against the sharp plastic edge.

After everything was wired I taped the two gutters tightly together along the inside/bottom edge and used a strong metal film/binder clamp (seen in the earlier photo above) to keep the hood together.  The hood was then placed on top of the tank and plugged into an outlet below.  The white interior of the gutter seemed to provide enough reflection, but if desired a suitable shiny material (aluminum foil?) could be glued to the inside of the hood to increase the amount of light reflected down into the tank.

Pro's: rather cheap, looks good (with the "contoured" gutters)
Con's: still a little flimsy, and must flip the entire hood over to change a bulb.


page updated 10/28/2000