What do you do when you have a 350 pound canopy on your tank but you can’t really engineer any practical doors or hinges? Why you put it on rails and countersink it so that the whole rig lifts up with the touch of a finger. The video above was made at the Penny Salsa factory in Auburn WA with the owner, Eric Hagee, assisting in the demonstration of the canopy rig. The canopy holds 6 x 400W halides in lumenarc reflectors and 6 x 110W VHO fluorescents with all the wiring being fed through interfitting PVC tubes visible in the back left corner. From what we could gather, the canopy is firmly secured to a square tube frame with two beams extending into guide rails down behind the tank. The entire set up is countersunk with 350 pounds of weight and extremely fluid. The assembly was customed engineered at an expense greater than most people’s reef aquarium budget but the idea should be easy to replicate at only a moderate expense for smaller aquarium setups.
