Once I got home from work, I plumbed the new spray bar into my system, here are some pics
A couple pics of how the plumbing job turned out
I love the look, the pipes stand out a lot less in the tank than with a lily pipe and there aren't any dead spots in the tank. I'm also getting awesome CO2 diffusion because of the longer hoses and elbows, there aren't any visible bubbles coming from the outflow which I had plenty of with the lily pipe. There is one flaw though...
This is what the flow reading looks like with the spray bar on. I know it isn't the plumbing job because if I run the filter with the bar off and the water just coming out of the pipe I get full flow. Too bad it's glass or I could just make the holes a little bigger. The velocity of the water coming out of the spray bar's holes is extremely high and my tank is getting a ton of circulation, but I'm probably diminishing the effectiveness of my filter because it's not turning over as much water in the same amount of time. My filter is definitely overpowered for the size of my tank so maybe the reduced water turnover won't have any measurable detriment on the system.
I'm not sure how I feel about the spray bar now that I'm using it. It looks great and is doing what I wanted but unless I can be ok with my filter always reading reduced flow then my only other option with it is probably to run it with a longer middle piece across the back of the tank which would ruin the aesthetic gains I had from getting rid of the lily pipe.