I am an electrical engineer and I was only addressing the use of flip-switches with my last comment.
Of course, depending on the available power supply, square footage and current layout and of the building, dividing the rooms is almost always advisable.
An “ice cube” relay is just a cute name for a relay in a clear case, generally used so you can see the moving parts inside a magnetic relay. Solid state relays don’t have any moving parts. Plug in relays are replaceable in seconds, but it often takes much longer to fault find and identify the problem.
It doesn’t matter how cheap a relay is and how quickly you can change it, if your room has been in the dark for hours on its “night” cycle, let’s say 7 hours and your cheap, quick change relay fails and turns the lights on, it could easily ruin a crop you have spent months growing from seed or clone.
The only thing a “flip-switch” is saving you, is the cost of the ballasts for the second room.
As an example, if you have a 2500 sq ft building with a 200 amp, 240 volt supply (normal in the average building of this size) and you split your flower room into two, (advisable in this scenario) you can safely power around 16, 1000 watt flower lights per room on 12/12, plus the necessary AC, pumps, fans and lights for a veg room to keep the flower rooms in a perpetual harvest.
With a “flip-switch” you only need 16 ballasts to drive the 32 lights, so you save the cost of the 16 ballasts. If we say a ballast cost $250, that’s a saving of $4000. Now imagine a year in to your new business a relay goes bad, the dark room gets lit up in the middle of it’s dark cycle and the crop gets ruined.
16 x 2 pounds/ light = 32 pounds
32 pounds x $2000/pound makes the $4000 initial investment of 16 extra ballast look cheap.
It’s an “obvious solution” in almost any size grow over about 10 lights, no matter whether it has three phase power or not, it just makes sense to split the lights into multiple rooms.
The building layout that started this thread already had multiple rooms that they were dealing with, it didn’t appear to me that the existing layout would work well.
Of course you can nitpick the above scenario all you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that the average flip-switch setup, is a potential problem not worth the savings, but most people are like you and aren’t aware of what could happen.
The only reason I have given any input to this thread, is to hopefully help people understand more and avoid problems, not to upset you, so please relax and don’t be so defensive.
