DIY Perfect-A-Hood Moonlight Mod

After purchasing my daughters tank, I decided some moonlights would be a good idea.

The Perfecto Perfect-A-Hood for a 35g aquarium is a little lacking if you ask me, but does leave room inside to allow a serious modder like me, to do some wicked work

I didn't want to mess with a system where I would have to do a lot of manual work, and I had a relay lying around from a previous project so why not use it right? This way, when the main light is shut off, the moonlights will automatically turn on. simple.

Well, I wasn't sure how I was going to mount it, but then it occurred to me that I could simply mount it in the side of the inner light mount on the fixture.
It was also very convenient that I happened to have a lid the EXACT same size as the rim on the relay.

I measure, marked, and cut the hole. Actually I melted it with my soldering iron for lack of a large enough hole saw.



Once that was finished I did some fitting and made sure everything was going to work out ok.





Once that was finished, I screwed it in through the white plastic, and back into the case. Essentially the relay was assembled exactly the same, except now mounted to this fixture.
The reason for doing this was simple. The relay base wouldn't fit in the fixture.

I also mounted a 12V transformer that I disassembled so I could mount it in the fixture itself. Gorilla Glue was used to secure the transformer. It works great.





Next it's on to the holes for the LEDs. After finding the appropriate sized drill bit, I was able to mark out a line, 20" long, from one screw mount to the other, and put LEDs every 5" apart. doing at the front where I did, made it really easy to get them lined up properly since I just used the perpendicular side as the drill guide.







I'm not totally finished the wiring yet, I need to get another power cord, and more of those blue connectors I used to wire the relay.

This is what it will look like assembled.



Stay tuned, I should have more connectors tomorrow, and will hopefully be able to get this finished up by then.

ya it works too I just did a quick and very dirty test. It will work nicely.

heh sorry, I just want to capture all the detail



I got this finished lastnight, and man it looks amazing.

All of the LDS are actually perfectly in line, and produce a perfect line across the bottom of the tank, while illuminating it just nicely.

I'll just post the next set as attatchments.

anyway, you can see it looks quite nice, and the pictures simply dont do it justice.

for the astute eyed out there, you will notice that I simply pushed the ends of the wires, right onto the relay pins.
this is only temporary until I get some more blue clips, but is thus far holding very well.

I would really like to clean up the wires some how, but im not sure at this point, since I did wire it up in haste

also, the extra power cord I had to add to power the LEDs, otherwise if I got the power from a single source, a plugin timer would have rendered the whole deal useless.

Just a small update I forgot to add.

After I had this together, I decided taking it apart and cleaning up the wires was a good idea, since they were messy and I simply couldn't stand the thought of something I made, looking that ugly.

So I took it apart, and sorted everything.
As you can see now, all of the wires are much cleaner and organized.

everything is running smoothly. this works amazingly