[Stones]

Originally Posted by Reef Pilot

You have a very nice tank, with lots of nice corals. Hope you get it back on track quickly. Good luck with your new lighting.

Thanks for the kind words but the corals at present are no where near their full color potential. Hopefully this upgrade in lighting along with increased maintenance will help get everything back on track shortly.

Originally Posted by lastlight

great work on that fixture. scary stuff all these blown ballasts. after i sold mine the new owner had similar issues if i recall correctly.

shocker that the grill rusted so bad... your tank is open top right?

and it's pretty mean to not post a fts under the new light...

I somehow knew you'd manage to sneak in post before I could finish documenting the whole build Brett

Thanks for the compliments on the fixture. It was a ton of work and in hindsight I'm not sure if I would do it again from all the unnecessary stress and the time it took.

I'm only off work and at home for 48 hours every 7-8 days. The rest of my time is spent several hours away in SE Sask so when I am at home, I typically have an overwhelmingly large amount of tasks to accomplish in a short period of time. I'm hoping that all my work will pay off in the long run seeing as the current trend is to supplement LED lighting with T5s. I figured this would be the best compromise I could make at the moment and there is definitely enough room left on the heatsinks to accomodate more LEDs if deemed necessary in the future.

I'm not surprised about the ballasts failing in your old fixture as well. My old 48" Sfiligoi stealth was the same generation as my current fixture and the new owner had said that 4 of the 8 ballasts had died. He was going to sell it to another reefer to gut for a LED build until I told him Sfiligoi had replacement ballasts available that were easy to replace and actually not that bad of a price.

My tank is an open top with the fixture sitting ~9" above the water line. I'm pretty angered about the grills rusting and actually just being there in general.

My old Sfiligoi stealth didn't have these ghettotastic grills on the back side. It simply had the same perforated aluminium insert that was present on the opposite side of the fixture. It looked way better but I'm guessing the engineers at Sfiligoi thought that it hindered airflow too much hence the change to the open hole/grill configuration. If they were going to use grills, then they at least should have got some custom stainless ones built in order to prevent rust instead of using cheap computer parts.

Seeing as the next years models came with 2 sets of fans, I'm guessing changing to the open hole/grill setup didn't resolve any of the heating issues anyway. All they succeeded in doing was making the fixture look bad. It's like putting black steel rims on a Ferrari...

As for the FTS, I spent all of my spare time fixing this light fixture so I didn't even have time to clean the algae off my glass on days off. As you can tell, I carefully cropped the tank out of the one photo showing where I mounted the dimming potentiometer

I'm hoping next time I'm home, I can do another water change, clean the glass and do some much needed pruning to some SPS colonies as well as my current crop of hair algae and caulerpa.