It certainly brights up your room

Yep it outshines my ceiling fan light in that half of the room lol. it was pretty fun to build. A couple of my demensions were a little off, namely the top and bottom. After i drew out the demensions, i realized i needed to increase the two sides by 5/8" each but i increased the wrong sides lol. So that's why the top looks too small for the box.

cool!

Thanks. I actuallly took down the M-250R1, put up the OV-10, took that down, and have the OVC up right now. I think i like the M-250r1 on the pole the best. even though it's loud and annoying.

Nice! I would add one of those lifting weights in the box to stop it from wobbling. I guess a metal box for the ballast would be good too if you plan to run it unattended for long.

it's not the weight just an unlevel bottom. my first class craftsmanship lol. i decided to disconnect the ballast and wire the second switch to the outlet.

i set a dresser on top of the stand i made, its extra secure now!

I guess you could put some leveling legs on the bottom then if you want it to be super stable.

yeah i guess. the EMT pole itself vibrates too. When i had bought those EMT brackets, i had accidentally bought 1" straps instead of 1-1/4" straps so i just reshaped them and used them sorta redneckish lol But yeah no more remote ballast in there. It's still in there but i disconnected it and pulled the wires from the "pole" so it's just the straight 120V line up to the light. I rewired the outlet so that the "B" switch controls the outlets now. I figured i had a spare switch, might as well put it to good use. the circuit breaker this was plugged into tripped today and i'm assuming it had to do with this but i don't know why. I didn't find anythign wrong and the street light was off. Just my laptop was plugged into it. i reset the circuit breaker and it didn't trip again, even though i didn't change anything. But after it tripped i decided to jsut simplify the wiring. even though i found nothing wrong, i can't think of anything else that would trip it. the breaker is for the outlets in my room and my brother's room. he wasn't in his room and i wasn't maxing out the 15 amps so i don't know what it was.

oh, and the R1 is back on the pole lol.

Hmm, I personally would have gotten new straps since the proper ones hold the pipe much tighter (I used a couple to mount my yardlight arm) and since they're pretty cheap anyways. Not sure why the breaker (at least the non GFCI/AFCI types, your house might be new enough to use them) would have tripped if you wired everything properly and nothing was overloaded.

Nice on the switched outlet too, it would be pretty useful for testing lights. Just make sure you have a 14G cord for it if you want to test 1kW lights.

I think the power cord i used for the box has 16AWG wires. I used 1AWG wire to bring power from the switch to the light (so 14AWG wires through the pole) and 12AWG for some of the wire. Whatever i had laying around really lol.

The circuit breaker looks like the gray one in this pic but it's 15A:


the breaker is for the outlets in my room and my brother's room. All the outlets are standard 15A duplex outlets.

Nice

thanks

Just over three years later, I just had to replace the EMT connector between the straight pipe and the elbow. The cast aluminum connector had cracked from the prolonged stress of holding a cobrahead (I think having my heavier 400W lights on it probably did it in lol). Not too bad though, as that's the only maintenance I've really had to do on this puppy.

You probably need to find heavier bracket to support the larger fixture

I looked for a compression fitting, since I figured that might be stronger but I didn't see any in 1-1/4". I should have used a single piece of EMT and used a conduit bender to get the shape or used rigid conduit and used threaded connectors but I took the lazy way out with EMT and the prefab elbows lol.

The coupling lasted three years so I'm happy. I didn't design this to hold up a big heavy 400W-sized light so I'm not surprised it failed. I just won't install my heavy lights on it anymore and it should be OK.