Solaris setup help

M

michad

We got the Solaris hung and on the tank Friday afternoon. I set the unit to Automatic Solar

Here's my confusion: Yesterday morning the lights appeared to be at mid morning levels and this was 6:00AM. Today it's 8:20 and we're still seeing moonlights only.

I've read through the manual and what I'm not seeing is how you setup the timezone or offset to properly align the light to Texas. 6:00AM might have been midmorning by Eastern or whatever timezone is east of them.

So who on dfwmas has a Solaris and can guide a newbie?
 
I got an answer, just in case anyone else wants to control the day like me....here's what I'm doing:

Some information on the adjustments:
Sunrise time is included in the day length
Sunset time is NOT included in the day length
Cloud cover is only active in the solar mode
The sunrise time will not be consistent, due to the Sun is in an elliptic orbit

Here is an example:

Desire to have sunrise start at about 12pm and sunset finish about 9pm. The sunrise should take about 1/2 an hour and the sunset should take about 1 hour.

To figure out the settings:

Sunrise is 30 minutes
Sunset is 60 minutes

Since the sunset is not part of the day, the day length would be calculated as:

9pm – 60 minutes (finish time – sunset length) - 12pm (sunrise start) = 8 hours or 480 minutes as the longest day

Since we want the days to be the same through out the year (or close), the shortest day = longest day less 1

The sunrise can be estimated by placing the length of day in the middle of the 24 hour span and adding 45 minutes:

(1440 minutes – 480)/2 (24 hours in minutes subtract the day length then divide by 2 to find the center point). = 450minutes = 8:00am.

Add 45 minutes = 8:45am estimated sunrise.

Since the desire is to start sunrise at about 12pm, the time offset needs to be set to: 8:15 - 12:00 = -195 minutes

So, the settings would be as follows:

Longest Day: 480
Shortest Day: 479
Sunrise Length: 30
Sunset Length: 60 minutes
Time offset: -195

This would give the following (approx):

Sunrise between 11:30am - 12:30pm, lasting for 30 minutes.
Sunset would start about 7:30 - 8:30pm and ending about 8:30 - 9:30

*updated to correct my miscalculations and typos **see a couple of posts down for my final settings and lighting.
 
Much trial and error with the settings and to get the lights to come on 12:00ish and go off at 9:00ish I changed to:

Longest Day: 450
Shortest Day: 449
Sunrise Length: 30
Sunset Length: 60 minutes
Time offset: -180

This would give the following (approx):

Sunrise between 12:00pm - 12:30pm, lasting for 30 minutes.
Sunset would start about 7:30 - 8:30pm and ending about 8:30 - 9:30
 
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