When I was setting up my fish room I had an electrician come in to put in a 220v line to run my heaters off. (with permission from my landlord of course) The panel I've got wouldn't support it so we looked at alternatives.
My reasoning was, I could run two 1500 watt heaters off a 220v line because at 220v they only draw 750 watts but, the hydro bill still shows that as 1.5Kwh. My thoughts were that I could heat my room more efficiently with two space heaters rather than one.
If I were having a professional fish room set up, I'd probably look at 220 for the lighting, but not for anything else. And remember the rule.. (which I forget) but isn't it like.. never run more than 80% of your breakers rating on one line? IE, if you're running a 20amp breaker, never run more than 16 amps on that line.


Doug

just illustrating how easy it is to eat up power :)


[/quote]If I were having a professional fish room set up, I'd probably look at 220 for the lighting, but not for anything else. And remember the rule.. (which I forget) but isn't it like.. never run more than 80% of your breakers rating on one line? IE, if you're running a 20amp breaker, never run more than 16 amps on that line. [/quote]

you would want to run whatever you could off the 220v. ie whatever device could run @ 220v.

and yes, 20% is the safety margin employed in todays breakers.

and just because you run the initial line 220v, doesnt mean you cant then branch off again to 110V :)

Overall power draw on the circuit is voltage x amperage; which should remain the same for both a 110 and a 220v setup. However power lost to heat is [correction : resistance x current squared] so a 220v setup should have less than a 110v and thus the difference should make it to the lamp given a constant line resitance.

Anyways, consider it a proposed experiment for someone with a 220v hookup and a PAR meter :biggrin: .[/i]

As a side note I called Albight lighting today to ask about M80 ballasts. They quoted me $153 each for Advance p/n 71A5880 and special order status taking 4-6 weeks. Sounds like everyone gets a different story. At that price it's better to just get a dual PFO HQI from J&L...

Here is a link to a older experiment ( albeit slightly biased to the manufacturers electronic ballast ... which is a dead link in that article btw )

http://www.animalnetwork.com/fish2/a...8/mar/product/

however it would seem that the electronic ballast draws less amps ... and if this is true then when this discussion came up with the Venki electronic ballasts and initially it was thought that there would not be much of a savings ... but if Venki's ballasts were even close to as efficient then one circuit only would be needed and you would save on breakers/wire etc

Food for thought :idea:

Cheers

That's a keen little factoid, I've never heard that before. Can you point me to any docs (online or otherwise) where I can do some further reading?? :biggrin: Thanks!!

Ron yeah they quoted me $109 for the 71A5880, Steve pointed out that it's an odd ball thing for them so they may be substituting other stuff, he suggested going in and ordering direct out of the catalogue when we see the correct PN. They also gave me the PN for the cap and ignitor for it to compare with the Advance catalogue.

Doug

Err... my bad. That should be Thermal Loss (Watts) = Current (Amps) squared x resistance (Ohms)

Fingers moving faster than the brain again. :eek:

that sounds more like a albrite price on them.

Steve

Ron, you realize thoes are both formula to figure out the same thing.. the second one assumes you don't know the voltage, and the first one assumes you don't know the resistance of the load.

so both will give you the total power consumed by a load and if you know all the factors and do it both ways you should come up with a number that is very close to the other.

Steve