I've been searching for a way to lift lights above my tank.
Anyone got some good ways/gadgets to do this?
Anyone got some good ways/gadgets to do this?
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For what it’s worth, I wonder how useful this would actually be. My lights are mounted to my wall about 8.5 inches above the water line and I haven’t encountered any situations where I needed to have the lights moved out of the way in the nearly 5 years that the tank has been running.
There have certainly been a few times where it might have been nice to be able to move the lights up a bit, but for me, at least, they certainly don’t occur often enough that it would be worth spending hundreds of dollars on a lift system.
If that’s something that you really want, then more power to you, but I wonder how often something like that would really wind up getting used.
again just shooting the breeze here but could a small truck winch be rigged/modified I wonder?
Can you provide details on your linear actuators? What brand or company did you get them from? Also, are they quiet like the ones used for stand up desks? Love your setup!!!Looks like you've go it solved, but if you ever go back into the design mode - here's the lift approach I took using four linear actuators and a T-slot (80/20) support.
Granted, this reef is a 360' walk-around and not a peninsula build, but with a little imagination, some planning, and a little patience you can put together pretty much anything for a solution.
Cheers,
Ray
Wow thanks for taking the time to provide such a detailed response! I'll be sure to reach out if I have any questions once I get started@Justin Thibodeaux - Hey Justin, I picked up the linear actuators used in this build from https://www.firgelliauto.com/
They've been very responsive, and should be able to help you out with your ideas if drop'em a note. While my particular actuators aren't all that quiet, I only use them once or twice a day a few times a week, if that. Usually it's a matter of having to get something into the reef (placing a new frag or a bringing in a fish) or remove something (a coral colony or some such). So noise really wasn't one of my determining criteria - function was.
Thanks for the compliment! It was lots of drawings, research (search engines, email, and phone calls are your friends!), and determination to get it to where I felt it would be stable, support the weight, and more than anything else, be able to raise the lights out of the way so I could access the reef from anywhere around the aquarium. The support on the "left" side of the aquarium is a 2 X 4 lag bolted to two wall studs. This provides stability and anti-torqueing. This allows me to use the ceiling trusses for main weight support, and I "over engineered" to support more weight than planned.
If you have any questions on how to approach a build like this, please don't hesitate to ask. It was fun!
Cheers,
Ray