Efficiency Opportunity Whilst Away From Home

Whilst looking forwards to the summer holidays… and feeling rather depressed about the cost of energy at the moment (a fairly constant worry for me… something I inherited from my dad I think!!) I hit on the idea that during time away from our tanks there is a real opportunity for energy saving I believe….

I wouldn’t dare do anything with respect to filtration but when it comes to heating and lighting there are opportunities I feed.

Firstly heating - I run my tanks near the bottom of the tolerable temperature ranges for my fish anyway personally but dropping temperature a little for a few weeks would slow the metabolism of the fish, reduce the need for feeding etc during that time and I would assume the filtration would soon grow a few extra bacteria to account for any reduction in filtration effectiveness. Would others agree? It’s likely the savings in energy use would be significant here if I assume my heater is on 50% of the time a 250w heater costs me about £1 a day, with lower household temperatures due to heating not being on etc, lowering tank temperature to create less of a gradient the heater is having to fight against seems to make good sense. If even only a 20% reduction in energy demand is produced, that’s still 20p a day saving.

The real opportunity I think is with lighting. Now I have heavily planted tanks so there is a need for some light. You could probably argue in a non planted tank, you could leave the lights off completely. My personal tactic I think will be to vastly reducing the lighting duration - say to 3 hours - and intensity maybe a little too - maybe to 2/3rds power. I think my lights are something like 25w which I reckon equates to about 7p a day to run 8 hours a day but it’s not just the cost the general eco efficiency point still stands… what I can say is reducing to 3 hours at 2/3rds power would reduce energy use by 75% which feels worth something.

The downsides I can foresee are potential losses to filtration from reduced plant growth, however I know plant growth slows towards the end of a lighting schedule at co2 concentrations in the water are depleted and do not feel instinctively (only) any such losses will be significant. Furthermore, it would be seen as a less natural schedule for the fish but with ambient light levels high in summer again I feel this is probably ok - after all there are shady mornings etc in the wild are there not!”?

All makes sense - good to have a bit of validation from others. I’m only thinking a degree or two of temperature change and looking back at this I think I’d personally rather not risk anything as my temperatures are low to start with for my species and I would hope that ambient temperatures might be slightly above freezing this summer lol, so the temperature differential might not be as severe.