Now a lighting question

If you've done a reef tank with a four foot shop light you can teach us!

Are you going planted? or just fish?

there ya go... a lot of HD now have a lil section of "special" bulbs some of which are listed for aquariums and such... if not yer LFS can always point you in the right direction for what they stock (online ordering is not always something people want/can do)

and unless you want to mount it to the canopy.. plexi and egg crate from HD is the way to go... and fyi.. the plexi knife is in the lighting section.. not the plexi section.. i dont know why...

I grabbed a dual 4' fixture for 15 bucks last week, wired power from an old broken single tank strip, and built it into a canopy. Looks great in the tank, but I am going to have to put some kind of cover/reflector on it because a lot of light ends up going through the canopy vents and into the room. If I can figure out a way to cut or re-bend the reflector from inside the dead light strip I'm all set. They do sell some fixtures with a curved extension over it to make sure the light doesn't shine up. I don't think they're too much more expensive.

Only drawback is that while I'd like to do this on my planted tank, it'd take up a ton of space to get the necessary wattage. As you're just doing fish, you'd be fine with one of these - I'm not sure what kind of fish you have but I put a 10000k and a 50/50 40w over my 55g (now 75g) african cichlid (tons of demasoni) tank and ran it 8 hours a day without any algae problems.