Long Day Lighting

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C

Cow

Senior Member
Location
Eastern Oregon
Occupation
Electrician
We do the dairy work for most of the dairies in this area, a couple of them are HUGE(22,500 and 7,500 milking cows) and none of them use long day lighting. We're currently wiring a 10,000 milking cow dairy right now from the ground up, which I built the lighting control panels for, and they didn't request long day lighting either.

I've heard of this for chicken farms and getting the hens to lay one extra egg/week but haven't seen it yet with dairies. Is this something you've just started hearing about it or have you been doing LDL for a while now?

I know some of these dairy farmers aren't willing to jump on the bandwagon until they've seen it proven with a definite track record, so maybe our customers are just giving it a little more time until they tell me they want to make some lighting changes!:)
 
Fulthrotl

Fulthrotl

~Autocorrect is My Worst Enema.~
Location
HB, CA (19 Hrs. 22 Min. from Winged Horses)
Occupation
E
ptonsparky said:
Milk production is increased considerably, 5 lbs/head, when cows are exposed up to 16 hrs per day of about 15-20 ft candles, followed by 8 hrs of darkness.

Small barns would be easy enough, 500' are going to be somewhat different.
Click to expand...

i'd think 0-10v dimming would be the best way to get the setpoint where
you want it.

it's not used in this application, but daylight harvesting would work excellently.
it'll maintain a setpoint of whatever footcandles you want, so if you have some
ambient light coming in, it'll allow for that, and maintain a constant light.

i'd do it with nLight. a couple thousand dollars probably would get you enough
hardware to do almost any size facility. local controls could be programmed with
a couple buttons.... one to go full bright for when you have to work in the facility,
and need bright light, and it would be a local override that would only be full bright
for an hour, then revert.

and you could put timers into the controls effortlessly.

is there a color temperature that is best? 5000k?
 
C

Cow

Senior Member
Location
Eastern Oregon
Occupation
Electrician
Fulthrotl said:
i'd think 0-10v dimming would be the best way to get the setpoint where
you want it.

it's not used in this application, but daylight harvesting would work excellently.
it'll maintain a setpoint of whatever footcandles you want, so if you have some
ambient light coming in, it'll allow for that, and maintain a constant light.

i'd do it with nLight. a couple thousand dollars probably would get you enough
hardware to do almost any size facility. local controls could be programmed with
a couple buttons.... one to go full bright for when you have to work in the facility,
and need bright light, and it would be a local override that would only be full bright
for an hour, then revert.

and you could put timers into the controls effortlessly.

is there a color temperature that is best? 5000k?
Click to expand...

That's good to know.

A guy like myself doesn't get into 0-10volt dimming doing dairies and other such ag work, but that's the great thing about using this forum as a sounding board to hear others experiences on what works well. I know we've done the wiring for 0-10v dimming in schools and similar places before, but I believe the systems have all been spec'ed and we weren't the ones doing the programming. Thanks for your input. If this comes up in the future, I may have to pick your brain on it a little.
 
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