how much does it cost to run arena lights

[Black_Points]

Where I live there is a big (ca. 2x) increase in the cost of electricity for a small business vs a residential house. My electric bill for my barn and arena sometimes is over $250/month (in the winter) which is what the cost of the house electric bill is.

Granted, I have a heated water trough in the winter and keep the tack room at 40 degrees and almost all my lights are fluorescent but if your friend is paying business electrical rates, her costs might be higher than you think. The electric company tells me that I could get residential rates if I put a kitchen and bathroom in the barn but that would mean another septic system and I already had to drill a separate well for the barn.

Mary in Western NY
http://www.bpequine.com

[merrygoround]

^ Put them in, just don’t hook them up to water.!:lol:

[msj]

Black Points-you already have a ‘kitchen’ with your fridge and microwave and sink in the tack room. All you need to do is add an Incinolet toilet like I did in my barn. There’s NO septic system as the toilet is electric and it incinerates any waste. Not sure though where you’ll put the toilet though but if you have electricity outlets in the loft, you could put it there. You’d just need to put a hole in the ceiling for it to vent. Wanna buy my Incinolet toilet?

PS. Mary, I just got my electric bill for the past month and the house and barn (tack room temp set at 52 F)was $188.

You might seriously want to look into that toilet in the loft… :yes: and change your electric from business to residential.

[Black_Points]

Good point Sue, I should probably look into that. It would be nice for the people that come to ride in the clinics but I wouldn’t be able to heat the “toilet room”.

Mary in Western NY
http://www.bpequine.com

[atr]

You all should look at some of the new LED floods. I’ve just put one up to light up my barn driveway area and it is really bright, clean, flat light, and costs virtually nothing to run.

[airhorse]

The LED arena lights are hideously expensive, and at a 2 cent per hour savings, still have a very long payback.

[mojozoom]

Our 200x80 indoor arena costs $0.27 per hour to run the full set of arena lights (based on Kansas City area electric costs). It has skylights on the walls along the long sides, so often we only need to run the center aisle of lights. Here’s a pic:

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-8oxsQTLU9l4/VKrYm9Czy3I/AAAAAAAAEjI/zoDzEYZCyLM/s800/CAM00188.jpg

The aisleway lights are on motion sensors and stay on for 10 minutes max if they don’t sense any additional movement in the area. You can see those in the background in this shot:

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-Cw_ZmxV7G9c/VKrYpa_cYxI/AAAAAAAAEjQ/1kIxAgyWnzA/s800/CAM00189.jpg

[BarbaricYawp]

OP – you might want to tell your friend to have an electrician check out her ground wires. We had a rather rapid ‘stepping up’ of the barn electric bill (which I attributed – incorrectly – to the addition of heavy duty stall fans). Come to find out we had a ground fault on the wire coming from the main transformer box to the barn that was ‘leaking’ electricity. I think we would have noticed it had the fault occurred somewhere that horses or people trod, but it was up under some pine trees. Power company came out and replaced that portion of the cable and our usage was miraculously restored to the previous levels.

Another possibility is a failing well pump… We had that one too. However prior to cacking completely the noble machine ran almost continuously the build the correct pressure. It ran… and ran… and ran, effectively faking us out about it’s health. Since that one was tied to the house electric bill (which varies depending on what my kids are up to) I didn’t notice it until after we replaced the finally-defunct pump. But it, too, was a sizable change in the bill.

So she may have seen a jump in usage that has zip to do with the lights and won’t change even if she removes them entirely.

[trubandloki]

@Black Points;7938353

Good point Sue, I should probably look into that. It would be nice for the people that come to ride in the clinics but I wouldn’t be able to heat the “toilet room”.

Horse people are tough. Heat is not required for most of us to pee.

[msj]

[QUOTE=trubandloki;7941008]
Horse people are tough. Heat is not required for most of us to pee.[/QUOTE]

No, agreed that most often a stall is all that is necessary, BUT if you need to do more, especially in BIG hurry, a warm seat is nice! Believe. me…

[Jim_in_PA]

[QUOTE=Black Points;7938353]
Good point Sue, I should probably look into that. It would be nice for the people that come to ride in the clinics but I wouldn’t be able to heat the “toilet room”.

Mary in Western NY
http://www.bpequine.com[/QUOTE]

But you’d need to heat it if it uses conventional plumbing…

[msj]

Actually, I explained to Mary in an email that she probably could put the Incinolet toilet in her hayloft area and easily heat it by using firewall materials for construction and she’d only need to heat it at the most for when she had clinics through the winter months and that would probably be 3-4 months at the most and only 2 days/month or 6-8 days max. I would guess a small space heater might do the trick or even to have a licenced electrician in to put in a small baseboard heater and thermostat.

[PartASH]

The running cost of the horse field lighting depends heavily on the size of the arena and the types of lights you select. The most energy efficiency luminary nowadays is LED. If you have the extraordinarily large site, US$30 per hour is possible.