My DIY Aquarium Lid

Decided to make my own lids with lights for the 3 aquariums I got at the Petco dollar per gallon sale last weekend. The exorbitant costs of lids with LED lights had me turned off of those.

I have a good advantage on this project, as I work in fiberglass molding, and have a good amount of fabrication experience. Also I got permission to grab some of the trash cut out panels from some of the parts we made. I used about 1/16" panels. Plenty of heft to handle the small amount of weight. Also I needed some Double sided clear Gorilla tape. Seems pretty water resistant to me, as I use it for outdoor security camera mounting for the last couple years. Also, I needed a Dremel tool. I don't have compressed air at home, so the next best thing (It really did well for this project) was my cheap 2 speed Dremel. I didn't even need to cut out a feeder hole, as I mounted the clip on handles upside down, as a lid-lift.

The light for my 2 10 gallons cost about 18 bucks. Tape, I don't remember. But 1 roll will get me all 3 lids. The light for the 20 long I haven't bought yet, but should be around 28 bucks. Still cheaper, and i'm overly happy with the light output. So here's what I came up with...

 

For the price of free, can't beat it! What I did was I had a 29g tank blow a seal on me, so I just cut it apart and used that glass for lids! I am going to buy some glass hinge off of amazon and it'll be just like store bought! I was able to do 4 20H tanks (I use them short end out so my lids basically had to be custom cut) and I have enough to do my 3 2.5g tank and 2 5.5g tanks!

 

Nothing like using what's on hand! I lucked out having access to press molded, non porous, fiberglass panels. Idk about using hand lay up panels. They seem to be porous. I looked at glass, but quality glass like what you're using would have been costly. But thanks for the idea. Whenever I get a failed seal, I know what i'm doing with the parts!

 

Nothing like using what's on hand! I lucked out having access to press molded, non porous, fiberglass panels. Idk about using hand lay up panels. They seem to be porous. I looked at glass, but quality glass like what you're using would have been costly. But thanks for the idea. Whenever I get a failed seal, I know what i'm doing with the parts!

An additional tip is that if you can get the rim off of with like a paint scraping tool, you can split the glass panes pretty easily with something super thin. A normal razor blade is too thick surprisingly, but what works for me is at Home Depot they sell a glass scraping tool branded as "Unger" and the blades it come with, which you can remove from the scraper, are so thin that you can cut the whole panel out easily. The scraper works remarkably well for cleaning glass as well- algae included.

 

Thanks for the heads up on that. Sounds like a tool I should add to my collection!