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.
Counterweighted canopy on rails lifts up with ease
Jake Adams
Jake Adams has been an avid marine aquarist since the mid 90s and has worked in the retail side of the marine aquarium trade for more than ten years. He has a bachelor’s degree in Marine Science and has been the managing editor of ReefBuilders.com since 2008. Jake is interested in every facet of the marine aquarium hobby from the concepts to the technology, rare fish to exotic corals, and his interests are well documented through a very prolific career of speaking to reef clubs and marine aquarium events, and writing articles for aquarium publications across the globe. His primary interest is in corals which Jake pursues in the aquarium hobby as well as diving the coral reefs of the world.
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