Metal halides

Mh,
originally uploaded by Hongyee.

Time to show off some of my hardware! OK, I'm not as bad as electrical stuff as most think. Managed to rig up the entire lighting system for the tank from scratch, and it's so much cheaper too. Yes, including the 2 parabolic reflectors in the photo.

Miss "Engineer" yx helped out with the reflective angles on the reflector, and using 2 pieces of wooden planks, I managed to bend these 2 polished aluminium strips. A couple of giveaways that it's DIY though - the 2 reflectors, being made 6 months apart from each other, are of different lengths. And the reflection angles aren't 100% precise, but gah, it's works!

These are housing a 150 Watt 20,000 Kelvin Iwasaki halide lamp each. I DIY'ed the 2 strips of 54W blue power-compact lights (not shown in the pic, they are behind) to simulate sunrise and sunset. The blue lamps come on 1 hours before and after the halides and give a "dusky" look to the tank.

Next DIY project in line - LED (light emitting diode) moonlights to simulate full moon periods in the tank. Possibly making a trip down to Sim Lim during the hols to buy an AC/DC converter for the 1W LED lights and I'll be set.

Hmm .. yx actually made an interesting observation. She thinks that all reefers are control freaks, at least for their aquaria. I think my fanaticism in keeping phosphate levels below 0.01 parts per million freaked her out some, and she was pretty enthralled about the sunrise-sunset simulation. But the moonlight ... ok, that totally freaked her out and she accused me of being crazy. That was when she realised reefers are control freaks. We want absolute values of ions in the water, we want to re-create the Barrier Reef in the dining room, we want to imitate mother nature's tides, lights and moon. Oh come on ... I'm still keeping her in the dark about my next reef improvement come November - a wavemaker device to provide strong turbulent flow by alternating different water output valves at different times. Think she'll flip.