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Reflectors for shop lights?

1396 Views 5 Replies 5 Participants Last post by  Snikerz
Hey everyone I'm currently using t-8 and t-12 for various tank but the shop lights (had them lying around) didn't come with reflectors. Is there any way I can buy or make reflectors? Doesn't have to be that polished because they're going to be used on breeding tanks. The light is really bright and gets in the way so I wanted to kind of focus it. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
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If you're handy, there's probably a way to bend pieces of aluminum around the hood of fixture.

If not, the easiest thing is to go on ebay and buy the reflective tape that hydroponic growers use for their diy lighting. I believe it's fairly expensive though.
The easiest solution would be to replace them with something like these CF lights with the PAR38 reflector. You can get them at Lowes in 26 watt, "daylight" 6500K formats for about $12 each. VERY good light producers.

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If you want easy and cheap, there's always aluminum foil. Slightly more expensive is a handful of small mirrors from walmart or target. Tape or glue the foil or mirrors to the underside of the fixture.
If you want easy and cheap, there's always aluminum foil. Slightly more expensive is a handful of small mirrors from walmart or target. Tape or glue the foil or mirrors to the underside of the fixture.
Mirrors are lousy reflectors. A good white paint would reflect more light. If you can shape a piece of thin aluminum sheet in a \__/ form, and attach that with one bulb per reflector, you have about the best reflector for a T8 bulb that is possible. There is room under the bulb with most strip lights to do this. With the reflector installed, if you look up at the bulb, you should see 3 bulbs instead of one - that is the extra light you can get from the sides of the bulb. The only problem is if the bulbs are too close together to get a reflector for each bulb in between them. Also, you don't need to do a super polishing job on the reflector for this to be very effective.
Thanks for the responses guys. I'm going to go ahead and try to use aluminum to make reflectors.
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