I obviously don't meddle enough

One of my minor pet peeves about my two aquariums is that the second one came with these awful plastic lids, the kind sold as "hoods" in the store. They were really awful when I got them - an ugly brown color. A can of black spray paint fixed that problem, but didn't do anything for the fact that they just didn't fit. Thus why I'm careful to crop them out of my photos. I went looking in my photo folders to show you, and found all of one pic to illustrate:



So you can sort of see that they're not resting flat on the tank frame at all. It just bugged me. So now that I've got a nifty 75 gallon, I had to go order lids for it! (Didn't come with any.) After poking around in the Big Box stores, I came to the conclusion that if I was going to get lids for a 75, I had two choices: the internet or the drive up to the nearest actual fish store, if they even had the proper lids in the first place. So I had to figure out what brand the 75 gallon is, since the framing on these things is definitely not standardized. There wasn't a name on the tank, but there was an anchor symbol (and a warning about not drilling tempered glass), so I concluded the 75 is a Perfecto aquarium, and ordered the appropriate lids from Amazon. Now for the broken 55 (also came without lids) I had bought a pair of Marineland glass lids locally. These lids were just a little smaller than a "perfect fit" but they still worked fine so I gave it no further thought - until now. I decided to swap the lids around - since I'll get rid of the plastic lids with the 55 that's leaving, and use the glass lids on the planted tank. Lo and behold, the Marineland lids are a perfect fit on the planted tank - and the plastic lids are a perfect fit on the cichlid tank! It's like the light swap all over again. (Why didn't I think to do that earlier?) Actually the reason I didn't try it earlier is because the cichlid tank has pride of place on the main floor - it's in the living room - and the planted tank is opposite the kitchen. I didn't want ugly plastic in the living room. Turns out that with the lids fitting, they bother me far less than I thought they would!

Moral of the story: figure out what brand of aquarium you have before you buy lids for it. And if you get stuff secondhand and have multiple tanks, play around with the equipment! ;)