1. 55W Compact fluorescent light kit is available from Aquarium Hobbyist Supply (aka A.H. Supply). Kit includes ballast, socket, reflector, and all the needed hardware. Lamp sold seperately.
2. Hood is pine made from three pieces of wood purchased at Home Depot and sawed into the seven pieces needed to construct what is shown. Total wood costs: about $5 and some change!
3. Other materials and tools used: 24 small nails, wood glue (not required, but I had it so used it), hack saw (well that's what I used anyway, a wood saw will do a better job), hammer, a phillips screwdriver, a drill (to put holes in metal reflector, but might need for pilot holes in thin pieces of wood to prevent splitting when nailing), wire cutters, and something to strip the wire ends (pocket knife will work fine).
With their kits, A.H. Supply can send you their tips page on building an 'Ultra-Simple DIY Enclosure.' It is free and you simply have to be sure and add it to your order. The 'Tips' document gives a lot of helpful advice as well as tips on the actual dimensions of standard sized wood vs. what they are labelled as (e.g. a 1'x4' board is actually 0.75'x3.5'). I won't cover most of those details here. What I did below was based on that set of instructions with a few modifications which will be noted below.
My first stop was to get some wood. Because I eventually plan on painting this hood rather than staining it, I choose easy to find and cheap to purchase pine. You can of course stain pine if you like the look of stained pine or have a tank stand that is stained pine. You could also get hardwoods such as Walnut and Oak to stain to match an existing tank's trim or stand.
The light and reflector are roughly 22' long, so this kit fits nicely into a fixture designed to be 2-feet long which will fit nicely over many standard aquarium sizes, either fully stretching the length of smaller tanks or sitting on top of a cover glass for longer tanks. I have an empty 15 gallon (24 inches) and 20 gallon long (30 inches) sitting empty in the basement, so I decided to make the fixture 24-inches long to work with either tank. If you already know what size tank you are going to use, you can tailor the length of the fixture to stretch across the full span (e.g. 30-inches if I knew I was going to use it on the 20-long) and simply center the light and reflector inside of it.
For the example fixture the 'Tips' shows, 1/4-inch thick board is used for the front and back pieces and 1/2-inch thick wood is used for the two end (right and left) pieces. I decided to use the opposite since I would rather have the thicker, and thus stiffer pieces used on the longest (front and back) pieces. You can do either or do neither and use 1/2-inch thick wood for all four pieces. On the top of the hood, the 'TIPS' uses a pair of 1'x2' wood strips spaced over the top of the hood. The ballast and reflector get attached to these top pieces so the one-inch thickness is used for securing screws. By using two boards, you end up with large gaps in the top which allows for better circulation. I used the 1'x2' strips as well, but ended up using three of them rather than two, but more on that later.
So off to Home Depot for my wood. I purchased a four-foot long 4'x1/2' (really only 3.5' wide) which would make up the front and back pieces (price: $2.70), a two-foot long 4'x1/4' which would be used for the two sides (price: $0.97), and a six-foot long 1'x2' for the top strips (price: $1.35). I bought a six foot piece because they simply did not have four-foot lengths as I had originally intended to get to make the two strips. So the total bill for all the wood needed to build the fixture was $5.02. I told you this was an affordable fixture to make.
As mentioned above in the quick facts, I used a hack saw to cut my wood. While this works fine, it certainly is not ideal. But I wanted to use a tool that I though anyone would have around the garage or basement. Maybe I am mistaken, but it seems like people always seem to have hack saws around, but not decent wood saws. If you do not have a wood saw, you can purchase a small hand saw perfect for this sort of project for not much more than $5-$10 for run of the mill ones, and maybe $20 or so for a nice one. But as you can see from the photos below, it is entirely possible to rip up wood well enough with whatever you may have around to make a fairly decent looking fixture.
I also free-hand sawed my fixture. Which means, besides clamping down as shown below, I simply drew a straight line with a pencil where I planned on making my cut and going at it with the hack saw. For another $5 or so, you can buy a mitre box (did I spell that right?). This is basically a box that you lay wood into and it has cuts in it that guide you saw. These allow you to make perfectly straight cuts either straight across with nice 90-degree corners and also for making 45-degree cuts.
As mentioned above, I plan on painting this when I get around to it, so I wasn't overly concerned about how straight my cuts were. I could always hide gaps with paint or maybe a little wood putty and painting over that. Plus I likely would paint it black, so dark gaps will blend with black painted wood more or less. If you plan on making a stained fixture, you might want to invest the $5 for the mitre box and make sure you use a real wood saw. Because staining a piece is meant to show off the wood, it will generally also show off gaps or bad saw cuts as well.
I am only going to mention a few of the measurements and cuts I made. How the measurements are determined are discussed in the 'Tips' page, so most of what I did will be reflected there.
Constructing the Wood Box
Time to start cutting some wood. First thing I did was simply measure the four-foot board to find the exact center and simply cut it in half. Normally you want to be sure to take into account the little bit of wood lost when sawing, but by cutting this piece directly in half, I would be taking a little out due to saw width on either side of my pencil line. After cutting the wood in half, these two pieces now determined the overall length of my fixture which might be a few hairs shorter than 24-inches. Next I cut the end pieces. As this picture shows, even only a two-foot board will yield lots of extra scrap after you get your two end pieces. Of course this fixture is for a single lamp. If you wanted a dual-lamp fixture, this same two-foot board would be enough for the longer pieces needed for the sides of a double lamp deep (front to back of tank) fixture. Now I have all four sides cut and ready to be nailed together. This photo shows how the four pieces will line up together for nailing. One thing I noticed was I think one of my boards got a little wider from one end to the other. So putting them on the floor like this you see how at some corners one piece of wood might be a bit taller than the one it butts against creating a bit of a mismatch. Laying them on the floor or some other flat surface to nail them is a good idea. This way all the boards will line up flush on one side (the floor side). While they may be a little uneven on the top side, well who cares, or I should say I didn't really care. But by having them all flush on the bottom allows the fixture to sit flush on the tank or top glass without rocking or light-leaking gaps to be present when on your tank.
The nails I used here were probably an inch long or so and rather thin. But you still might want to drill pilot holes before you drive them in. With the nails being driven through the 1/2-inch thick boards they didn't split. But anywhere you put a nail through the side of a 1/4-inch board, you will want to drill small pilot holes or the wood will split, at least with softer pine it will. Also in my case I was leaving the nail heads exposed, so if you do the same you might want to pick nails that look nice, maybe little brass ones if you are going to stain. Otherwise you can just paint over them, or counter sink them (driving them slightly below the surface of the wood), fill the holes with wood putty, and then paint or stain over that.
Time to put in the top. As mentioned above, the 'Tips' document uses only two strips of the 1'x2' to make the top. Since I had the six-foot piece, I had enough to make three strips. I also thought it would look nicer since it would more fully cover the top so you wouldn't really see the top of the reflector or the ballast with three. The draw back is that the gaps would be much smaller so there will be less airflow into or out of the fixture. However, even with the three pieces, there is still enough gaps between to allow for some heat rise out of the fixture. OK so now all the wood work is basically finished. Pretty easy stuff, eh? You now should have a fairly decent looking wood box in which we are now going to mount the 'guts' of 55W compact fluorescent light kit.
I finished constructing a 96W 36' long version of this fixture using a single 96W lamp. I will be using that project to show how the guts go into the wood box I made in more detail than shown below for this project. I'll place a link on this page to that write up whenever I get it done. Putting the ballast into the box and then wiring up the line cord (the one you plug into the wall). Here is a close up of the wiring section, in particular showing how the earth ground wire it attached under the screw holding the ballast in place. Also note the strain releaf to secure the line cord to the side of the fixture.
After drilling the pilot holes in the reflector, you can remove the protective plastic before installing. Reflector and lamp clips are secured into the fixture using stand offs and wood screws (both supplied in the kit). After cutting the wires to the socket to the proper length (the red and yellow wires laying loose in the previous photo), it is now a simple matter of plugging the lamp into the socket, then plugging the lamp into the clips and dressing the wires to the socket out of sight behind the reflector. It should be noted that the socket does not actually attach to anything but the lamp. The lamp goes into the clips and those two clips hold the lamp in the fixture. I was confused when I first got the kit how the socket gets attached to the hood. I had another person email me asking me the same question. So the answer is the socket just hangs off the end of the lamp attached to nothing else except the wires that go to it.
Plug it in and instant light! I mean instant literally also. The ballast used in this kit is an instant start type, so there is not flickering or delay when the lamp lights. Before you even get the plug all the way seated in the outlet, the lamp will be lit. When I first got the kit, AH Supply was using a rather whimpy lamp clip. Normally it was fine but it didn't take much to jar the lamp loose out of the clip like if you lifted it off your tank and it slipped out of your hand the lamp would likely fall out when the fixture hit the top of the tank. AH Supply realizing this was a bit of a problem beefed up the
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