arcticmallard
Member
- Location
- Anchorage, AK
Hey all, I have a couple of inquiries for electricians/code experts out there. I'm an electrical EIT, and I've used non-coincident heating/cooling loads (NEC 220.60) before to cut demand load during design before, but I'm curious as to if/how one can use this for lighting loads. Me and a couple of my colleagues are starting a side business in a different field and are working on preliminary design. We're going to open a grow shop, and we don't have enough service to run all the (HID) grow lights we want all at once. In the end, I'd like to run two grow light circuits, each with eight 1000W HPS fixtures for flowering. My question is this: is there a way that you think we could use a timer and lighting contactors to run two lighting circuits on opposing 12 hour cycles? Do you think this would be enough to satisfy local inspectors that these are indeed non-coincident loads? The idea is when one grow light circuit is on, the other is electrically disconnected so that the two circuits can never be electrically connected to the panel at the same time. Ideally, I'd like to have a 10 minute buffer between cycles. We're going to use lighting controls that keep the ballasts warmed up (hence the 10 mins to let the ballasts turn on and warm up), and they ramp up the fixtures instead of just turning straight on to 100% to mitigate large inrush currents. Please, let me know if I'm not clear enough in my explanation. Let me know what you think. Thanks!