Lights without canopy

[beatle]

Another thing I've learned that has changed in the past 10 years has been a trend towards rimless, open top tanks.  They look great, but my new tank will be going in my office, and most of my viewing will be while I'm sitting.  I've read about light spill with both LED and T5, and I'd like to avoid being blinded every time I look over at the tank from a seated position.

 

If I go rimless, I'd plan to build some kind of floating canopy, perhaps like this: 

 

 

I think there would still be the chance of glare with this setup depending on the height of the lights (I'm thinking putting the LEDs 8-10 inches above the surface).  Has anyone else here conquered this?  Anyone have an open top setup nearby?

[DaJMasta]

There is definitely light spilling from the sides, but basically, you just have to make sure the angle is right for how the room is used.  If you've got seats nearby, for example, you just need for the canopy or light optics to prevent light getting out the side high enough to to eye level for the people around, so you can pick lights with narrower optics (that were designed for higher mounting anyways) or you can just make the canopy a little taller and mount the light higher up in it (so you get that light blocking shield from the overhang around the base).  Something like a diffuser panel, especially if inset into the frame slightly, could have a similar effect, but I don't know if that's an every time kind of thing.

You can probably test mount the lights and get a pretty good result when assembling them, but if the way the lights mounted to the canopy had some space for vertical adjustment, you could allow yourself some room for fine tuning how much light spills out if you decide you are fine with more or want less down the line.  Depending on the light mount, this may not even be too hard to do.

[ReefdUp]

I have a rimless tank with canopy... and I can assure you that my neighbors can all still notice a blue glow from my house at night.

 

Ours was for aethetics to cover up the lights though (not for handling light spillage). (No idea why the image rotated....)

 

[lowsingle]

I use an ATI T5 fixture with reef brite LEDs hanging from the ceiling and it looks very clean aesthetically.

 

Darren