so when it comes to building everything for the aquarium gallery we've come to the lighting
portion of it and today's video i want to show you what i built and why i think you probably
would too so about five or six years ago i built pendant style lighting just like this and when it
came to this rendition of the aquarium gallery i was racking my brain of you know what do i want to
build uh what do i want to get out of it and how am i going to do it you know obviously first and
foremost i wanted something to be more symmetrical and consistent across the entire aquarium gallery
because previously we had all different types of lighting and brands out here and it just didn't
look that great the tanks looked great but there was a number of things that i didn't like about it
one of the things i want to do this time is just make sure everything looks consistent across the
entire gallery and we're getting close to that so obviously it would only make sense to build all
the same lights for all of the aquariums but of course when calculating how many lights i'm going
to need out here to light all of the tanks it's about 26 individual lights so obviously the costs
and the ease of the build has to be included as well i want to keep these costs relatively low and
because i got to build 26 of them i don't want it to be too complicated obviously i also want it to
look really good and one of the things that i'm liking about this design which i'm going to show
you how i did step by step here in a second is notice that there's no glare it's not lighting
up the room it's just lighting the aquarium and that's what i like most about these lights
is that there is no um over spill of light no glare on the glass i could take better videos of
pictures like look i could see him perfectly clear now you guys were complaining that he doesn't look
good in that tank right now the lights i'm going to uh where are you going the lights need to be
changed uh it's the color spectrum of that light is just making him look pretty bad i'm going to
do something different there i'll just build something into that rock it's going to look really
good so like i said about five six years ago i built these pendant style lighting so i thought
why not do it again they're perfect and it doesn't matter if i built them before i just really like
them obviously i need to clean up all of the wires and whatnot but i just did that last night look
at all the plants going around watch this it goes around the entire building so above every aquarium
and i'm talking every aquarium it's going to have oh we can't see it it's going to have
it's going to look awesome let's put it that way another big component into me deciding what
how i was going to do lighting out here moving forward was i wanted to be cheap to run i have
to lower costs out here i'm telling you at one point previous to any changes we had about 3000
watts of lighting out here eight hours a day which is about 126 dollars a month it doesn't sound like
a whole lot but that's just lighting then we have pumps then we have the the heat pump then we have
so many other things that are adding up into the overall cost and it costs more to run this
building than it does my house with four people living in it so after some simple calculations
i realized i could do this type of lighting and go from 3000 watts to 300 watts going from 126 a
month to about 13 a month this is awesome mind you that's going to be the theme or one of the
themes out here moving forward is i'm going to be building a lot of stuff that's not only functional
looks good uh does exactly what i need it to be but it's also going to be economically friendly
to build it as well as to run it here's how i did it i bought myself a little plastic a bunch
of like little plastic flower pots this is a white one although in the video here you're going to see
that i have a black one i also used a and i got these for like two bucks a piece uh then i got
uh a pendant light fixture for three dollars it was only six feet long if i went 12 feet
which probably would have been a little bit more ideal for cable management um it would have cost a
little bit more but they were only three bucks for the six foot long version and then the led bulb
itself at a 5 000 kelvin uh temperature rating costs another five bucks so we're looking at
this build costing a total of ten dollars obviously all we got to do is drill a hole in it
put the electrical fitting through twist in the light bulb and we're literally done this build
shouldn't take longer than five minutes obviously using a step drill uh will stop you from cracking
the uh plastic and depending on how cheap you get they're gonna crack so you might wanna have
a couple of extra or at least go very very slow now the reason why i have white ones is
previously we uh we built these and on the inside we put some like reflective tape and i thought
what would be like an even cheaper way to do this because light is kind of absorbed into black
but i don't need a ton of lighting over the 2000 and i don't need a ton of lighting over the 700
so i just went with black and saved myself some paint and we're going to get to that in a while
because i can't grow plants in there the walru will eat any type of plant that goes in the 2000
and there's no real purpose of having plants in with the stingrays because that's now just for
them but if i took some spray paint and spray painted the outside of it i could probably do
about 10 to 15 individual flower pots with this i can keep the inside white and this will act like
the reflector then of course just took a little screw in you know little hook and hung them off
of there now these uh wires i like i said i just did these ones last night so um i've got to hide
the wires i'm going to run the wires back behind the plants so you won't see any type of wiring
whatsoever and one of the things that i like about it is i don't like the color spectrum this
is putting on the tank this is just a temporary holding tank if i don't like the color spectrum up
there i just twist the ball for five bucks i can change the color not that big of a deal i might
even take it as far as to paint the cords like i did this one so they blend into the black ceiling
but when we come over to this one it's white so i just left the cords on that white as well
now if you want to get fancy and you know spend a few extra bucks like another 10 bucks make sure
you get dimmable bulbs the price doesn't really change there but then i installed a dimmer switch
so i can have it as bright or as dim as i want but again that's an additional cost and there's
no wiring or anything like that i just drilled it through the wall to have the switch there and
glued it to the wall it's literally right here and on the other end i plug it into the wall and then
the lights go into it there's no wiring it's super simple and it allows me to have a dimmer i just
think it looks good i think it's awesome i think this is fantastic for people that already have
like these types of lights in your house and you know you want your significant other or you want
your house to look uh you know have a little bit more feng shui to it and kind of everything blend
in this could be an option now if i need these lights lower or higher all i got to do is raise
them or lower them it's not that big of a deal now will these lights grow plants maybe some anubias
and you know very low light plants but if i really want to grow plants or have a heavily planted tank
or anything like that because the 120s are like so high up in the air like this might this is close
to seven feet up in the air if i really wanted to keep the look and the functionality of this
all i have to do is take maybe a fluorescent strip light and put it right on top of the
tank i won't be able to see it because it's up so high and when it comes to tanks on the bottom
obviously i'm not going to be able to fit this under it maybe it's just not going to look that
good so i'm probably just going to hang some fluorescent lighting underneath or some some led
strip lights of some sort now i mentioned doing that to these tanks simply because and again i've
got to clean up all these wires i mean i'm just installing things and doing 100 things at once but
um the 180s once i built the rack it's going to have you know the same dimensions as the uh
120 rack so the tanks will be up seven feet uh they're actually going to go up to the height of
the plants there so it's gonna the entire building is now wrapped in this it's so so cool i just move
my hand so you guys can actually see it goes around the whole place i just love it i think
it looks cool um it looks a little awkward right now because everything's kind of like destroyed
and on the floor and whatnot but once the tanks are in here once everything's set up once we
have everything good it's gonna look absolutely phenomenal okay so what if we don't like the idea
of adding a strip light or led light you know if the lights do everything i need them to do
but what if they don't what if i do want to have one of the tanks to be high lighting or something
like that well i still have all my original lights these are those ai primes and wouldn't you know it
they fit in here perfectly so all i would do to be honest with you is run one of its wires
up through here and it can hang and uh put its cords up through it and it'll look like the rest
of them and blend in obviously i gotta spray paint it and whatnot but there you have it so
that's what i'm doing for lighting out here i love it i think you guys are going to enjoy it i have
i think i got 10 or 15 more of these to build i also have to address the lighting on the arowana
tank because it's just horrible it doesn't look good there that lighting was never meant to light
an aquarium it's meant to light a background to make that look good it was never meant to
make an ultimate blood red arowana look good he looks more like gold or yellow or something
in there but that's it and i'm absolutely loving these lights the next thing i want to talk about
is i got all the two by sixes cut up and i'm ready to build the racking system the racking system
won't take long maybe a day to build it uh paint it i got to paint the floors make everything match
repair the walls and whatnot from the past stand or the pass rack that was there
and then move the 180s in build their lights build the filtration
and uh if you guys don't want to miss any of that you're not subscribed to my channel
yet make sure you do we're clearly gonna miss i'll see you guys in the next video