You may have read my previous version of below write-up, which I published about a week ago and you may notice I've now updated it, as last week's mods were, errr, modded some more earlier today... Saturday, 30 January 2010.
The main changes:
Remove the hood from your tank: you will need to unplug your lighting from the power center. To remove the hood, you will need to carefully remove the pins from the internal hood supports and the pins that connect the hinges at the back of your hood. Be careful not to drop either the pins or the skimmer lid and timer cover in or behind your tank as you remove them. Laying it on its back on a soft towel with the lights facing up, open up the hood by removing the 6 plastic screw caps and then simply unscrewing the hood, lifting out the inside (it's a clam fit). You can leave the transparant watertight light cover in place. Be careful when you lift the inner panel off as it is connected to the hood shell by the wireing for the moonlights. These wires have a tiny connector somewhere half way down which you can simply disconnect before you can lift off the inner panel. Remove the T5 tubes and their clips. The (white) T5 starter unit simply unscrews as well and you can unclip its connectors from the little square distributor it connects to (Photo Copyright and courtesy - StevieT):
I then capped off the now exposed connectors on the distributor with some heat shrink. This left me with the inner part of the hood looking as per below. Note how I taped up the moonlight connector wires with some masking tape just to remind myself what these wires went to originally, and so as to not get them confused with the wires running to the fans, later on. The moonlights were later simply reconnected.
I used two Aquarays as my T5 replacements - one Reef White and One Marine Blue. You can fit the black plastic mounting strips these lights come with, by driling two holes into each of them, and screwing them into the screwholes inside the mounting points where the T5 sockets and clips used to be fixed into the hood (see image below - the four screwheads are clearly visible atop the stalks supporting the mounting strips - indicated by the green arrows). As you can see, I initially removed the metal reflector but then had to open the hood back up later on to re-install it: without it, the four moonlights your RSM130D comes with, throw 4 disappointingly tiny columns of blue light, rather than a pleasing overall ‘glow'. As you can see also below, I angled my Aquarays out a little bit so they don't shine straight down. I did this by filing off the tops of the 4 mounting points inside the hood at a slight angle (you can use sand paper, a file or a Dremel tool):
The two plastic stalks on each Aquaray fit into the plastic sockets on the mounting strip that comes with your Aquaray (see orange arrows, above). Once the stalks are inserted into these sockets, they are secured by tightening four small screws inside the plastic sockets. It is worth noting that when putting the silver reflector back in place these screws are impossible to get to with a screwdriver. It would be relatively easy to glue the Aquaray stalks into the sockets but I would then have a problem when it comes to replacement. I therefore opted to simply drill four 7mm holes in the sides of the reflector, inline with each of these four screws, so that I could poke a screwdriver through the holes to tighten them:
...don't worry - I'll talk a little later on about the 3rd Aquaray shown in this image - and the 4th, which isn't shown...
Although it is technically possible to install the transformer for the Aquarays inside the hood and connect it to the power source that the T5's came off, I opted to have less heat generation inside the hood and leave more room for air circulation by simply having the two power leads from the Aquarays exiting the hood at the back and running out through the little cut-out for the optional chiller pipes, in the back of the tank. From there they go up to an Aquaray controller which allows me to automatically dim the lights up and down in the morning and evening, which I find kinder on the fish and critters in my tank as the ON/OFF nature of the hood timer is a bit drastic. To allow the leads to exit the hood, which seals tightly, I driled two small cut-outs into the edge of the outer shell, roughly where they would end up in front of the chiller pipe cutout in the tank:
Something else I modded whilst I had the hood open was its cooling. I found the Red Sea fans a little noisy so I bought myself an ultra quiet PC fan to replace them. Truth be told: ultimately this set up is only marginally quieter but it wasn't a lot of work so I went ahead with it anyway. The standard fans pop out of their slots easily. They are not actually fixed to or with anything. You can then simply unplug them as they come with little connectors on them. I then simply cut the connectors off the fans and soldered them onto the wires on my new fan. When doing this, you need to take care that you connect your new fans to the red/black wires of the connector the right away around or, normally, the fan will simply not work. I tested all my electrics several times before closing the hood later on. The correct size for the fans you need is 50x50mm (12V) but I bought a 40x40mm fan as this was the only sub 20dB fan I could find. I simply superglued it into one of the slots that the old fans sat in and capped off the redundant wires that ran to the other fan with some heat shrink. When I change my new fan in the future, it'll simply snap out and I can fit either a new 40x40mm or 50x50mm fan in there.
Note about the hood timer
By doing a conversion as described here, the Red Sea timer inside the hood now only controls the times when the (new) hood fan and the moonlights come on and switch off. As mentioned, the new LED lights will now be controlled independently by an external Aquaray controller.
I added my third (Marine Blue) Aquaray to the hood flap at the front. To install it, a lot of people simply stick their Aquaray on the surface of the flap. My problem with this was that the light gets awfully close to the water, especially when topping up the tank to the brim, and it is very exposed to knocks and snags when you are using the flap to do regular maintenance. I therefore took the plunge and bought a Dremel tool to cut out a section of the flap. It is probably fair to say this flap is over-engineerd and very solidly constructed from thick plastic, with thick partitions both lengthways and across (to give it rigidity). Removing a lot of this makes it less rigid, but by no means flimsy. You will have to be prepared to cut into your nice, pristine, hood to take this approach: personally I am happy modding anything you cannot see from the outside but draw the line there. After all, I selected this specific tank for its simple, clean design. As you can see from the image below, I really butchered the flap - which was largely due to picking the wrong tool: it turned out the Dremel tool simply melts the plastic rather than cutting it, so I would advise you to consider a precision jigsaw or something of that nature. The outline I drew in white pencil served as no more than a rough guide in my case, but with a better tool I am sure you could achieve quite a clean cut! It is worth noting that you will not need to cut out more than the area above the orange line (below). Just beyond it, towards the blue line, runs a plastic cross-brace which makes life very difficult when cutting. However, having gone a bit further (to the blue line), ultimately I am happy with the amount of room the heat sync now has available to 'vent'.
This view (above) also shows the two plastic angled 'ramps' to the left and right of the cut-out, which I constructed from the plastic I had cut away and which I superglued into place. I then proceeded to drill holes into each of these ramps, into which I then screwed the plastic mounting strip for the Aquaray. The angle here obviously means that this Aquaray too shines down at and angle towards the back of the tank.
One of the problems with mounting a light into the flap is that (a) you want to continue to be able to open the flap independently of the rest of the hood and (b) you ideally want to run the power lead to the lights somewhere out of sight. The answer is to just run it along the bottom of the hood, inside the tank. To allow yourself to still open the flap but stop the lead from dropping in the water when you close it, you can run it through some plastic 'guides' that you super-glue to the hood. I made mine from plastic clips that are used to run thick electrical cable along walls. I cut them down to half cilindrical shapes and glued them to the hood at 3" to 6" intervals to guide the cable along the bottom of the hood and towards the chiller pipe cutout at the back of the tank. If you weight down the part of the cable that dangles out the back of the tank, it will automatically pull the cable tight each time you close the flap, stopping it from going slack inside the tank and dropping in the water. Photo shows hood before addition of 4th Aquaray beam at the back:
A fourth Aquaray was later mounted at the back of the tank, just behind the clear plastic light cover. As you can see from the pictures further down, both this Aquaray and the one inside the hood, right next to it, are Reef White, whilst the two front Aquarays are Marine Blue. The reason for this, is that the rock at the back of the tank is closer to the lights as it build upwards towards the back, and I wanted to avoid having too many unnaturally blue patches of light all over it. To fit this light, I drilled 4 small holes (3mm each) through the plastic hood and the metal internal earth plate inside it. To reduce the extent to which the Aquaray protrudes towards the surface of the water, I did not use the plastic fixing strip provided but instead used thin cable-ties to secure the beam to the hood, using the four holes to run them through. It's perhaps not as elegant as my other mods, but effective and very secure nonetheless.
Whilst my internal hood-mounted beams each tilt outwards a little and the front-flap beam points towards the back of the tank, I wanted to angle this fourth one towards the front. I drilled another two holes along the edge of the Aquaray closest to the transparent plastic light cover, and ensured they aligned with the little slots along the edge of the Aquaray, where the clear and black plastic of the Aquaray clip together (indicated above, on the opposite side of where I screwed into them). By driving two self-tapping screws from the top, through the hood and into these holes, they pull the front edge of the Aquaray tight towards the hood, and therefore provide you with a finely adjustable and robust way to set the desired angle, which also helps in terms of allowing air to circulate around the heat-sync, which runs along the back of the Aquaray:
Finely adjustable angle - and plenty of air circulation around the heat sync
Two holes for the cable tie and one for the self-tapping screw (repeated at the other end of the Aquaray too) Once this was all done, running the cable was easy as I had ensured I had the Aquaray the right way around to have its power lead exiting in front of the chiller vent, through which it would run to the external Aquaray controller. I then spent a few minutes filling all six holes with silicon to keep the hood fully watertight.
Tidying up
Before putting the hood back together I took some time to secure any loose wires with some electrical tape and cable ties. I also made sure I removed any dust, bits of plastic and solder that I might have dropped into the hood.
Open and shut:
Happy inhabitants? Set up when 5 weeks old:
