How long are your daytime lights on?

[Wingnutt021]

I keep my lights on for 12 hours. My thinking is that since the reef is close to the equator, they usually get 12 hours of sun and 12 hours of dark.

What are your thoughts?

 

[MartinE]

I usually have some sort of light going 24h a day moonlight, actinic, or daylight, on a gradual scale on and off cycle. So your poll is misleading, if people like me have lights on all the time its going to skew 12h or more. If you were to ask me how long my daylight bulb is on I would say 8 hours.

 

[Wingnutt021]

i'm sorry.. i meant the daylight light. i have the moon light on as well

 

[MartinE]

No problems just trying to answer you question accurately as possible.

 

[brandonberry]

I keep my halides on for around 10 and the actinics come on an hour before and go off an hour after. Ideally, if I had the space, I'd have 10k compacts as well and only run the halides 8 hours, have the actics come on 2 hours before, the 10ks 1 hour before, the 10ks go off one hour after and the actinics 2 hours after. IMO, this would serve mainly a function of electrical savings and appearance and probably would not affect coral health that much.

 

[MartinE]

I agree halides do suck a lot of juice, I would be interested in knowing the power consumption of halides vs pc and halides vs vho and halides vs t5, Sanjay probably has something on this if I serched long enough.

 

[brandonberry]

Just look at the wattage. Divide wattage by 1000, multiply by the number of hours per day that you run your lights and multiply by rate per kw/h that you are charged and you will know how much it costs you to run your lights per day. If you really want an accurate figure, you also need to account in fans, chillers, and how much extra your AC runs as well.