incandescant hood DIY

[austinpetemo]

ok i have a hood similar to this one here

and i have those flourecant screw in bulbs for it. well, thats not enough lighting. so ive decided to make it better. what i plan to do is take the guts out of it so i just have a plastic shell. than im going to get 2 additional sockets of similar wattage. im going to line them up with the sockets in the back of the hood and the lights pointing twards the front of the hood. they will all be hooked into a switch and 2 plugs if i cant make one.

the end result will be 4 of those swirly screw in flourescant bulbs and if im right that should be at least 4wpg for 10g so i can grow more plants.

any ideas???

 

[Sploke]

If you use 23w spiral fluorescents you can get 4wpg without changing anything.

 

[austinpetemo]

i think that the sockets already in the hood have a low max wattage

 

[vampie]

Uh huh, it can handle up to 50w. I don't think there's going to be enough room in there for four bulbs anyways.

 

[Sploke]

the max wattage is there (which is I think like 14w per bulb) because incandescents get much hotter than the PC bulbs. I'm pretty sure the 23w ones will fit....barely. I don't think the bulbs would fit with the sockets pointing forward, without getting them low enough that they would touch the water when the talk was full.

 

[abcdefghi]

I have the exact same hood on my 10G, I just unscrewed the existing incandescent bulbs and screwed in the CFL bulbs. I think I used the 15W CFL's (the smaller sized CFL) and they just about fit under the shields that are on the hood.

I don't think there is room for 4 bulbs pointing to the front of the hood. Maybe, if you could move the 2 existing ones to each end, and then put another socket in the middle you could get 4 in that way. Kind of like this:

<bulb1 bulb2> <bulb 3 bulb 4> (the little < are the sockets)

I think with the bulbs in mine I am around 3WPG just using 2 bulbs. Growing low light plants, but also a lot of brown algae at the moment.