Fluval Spec V Aquarium Lid

Fluval Spec V Aquarium Lid

If you've got a Fluval V five-gallon aquarium, you know what an excellent design it is. There is really only one problem with it, and that is the large opening in the lid under the light bar. It makes it easy to feed your fish, but it also allows the water to evaporate quickly.

This is a fast and easy model to help reduce that problem.

Some notes and recommendations for using this

1. The main lid design is in two parts. There is also a 'glue plate' for connecting the two parts if you want to. Plain old super glue will do the job nicely.
2. However, I recommend NOT gluing the two parts together. They work fine as two individual pieces, and you don't have as much stuff to move out of the way when it's time to feed the wee beasties.
3. To the obvious objection about this design, yes, it absolutely will reduce the amount of light that gets to your tank. But not, perhaps, as much as you might think. Some things you can do to cut down on light loss:

• I printed mine in PLA, but to maximize light transmission you should use transparent PETG. PETG is an amorphous polymer so it has less light refraction than PLA, which is granular. PETG is also less prone to warpage.
• Print it on a smooth, not textured, build plate.
• Turn on ironing for all top surfaces. If you're looking for a nice model to determine the best ironing settings for your printer and filament, see the links below.
• Use the lowest infill you're comfortable with. I used 10%, but I think you could get away with as little as 5%.
• If you've got a planted tank, you may want to add an hour a day to your Lights On timer, depending on the species you keep.

Unfortunately the two lid plates are too big to fit on an A1 Mini print bed. You could of course easily cut them into smaller segments in the slicer. Also, I've included the FreeCAD design files here. Feel free to download and modify them as you want.

The filament I used for the model pictured is SUNLU PLA Transparent.

Links

FreeCAD - 100% free and open source 
https://www.freecad.org/

An excellent model for determining optimum ironing settings

https://makerworld.com/en/models/175615-complete-ironing-test-for-pla-and-petg#profileId-193062