Hello and welcome to Dolbec Aqua Designs
Today we will be talking about light timers that you can use for your aquarium
I'll be talking about the manual timers
We'll also be talking about digital timers
and lastly I'll be talking about the more popular ones, the smart timers
to show you how the light timers work I will first connect them into this power bar
and then I will plug in this led light
so we're just going to plug in the lights like so
and now you can see that the lights are on
most of the aquarium lights that you find will have a switch that you can use to turn on and off the lights
now unfortunately what this means is that you have to remember to turn on and off the lights every day
now you'll want to be using timers for your aquarium lights because this will make your life so much more easier
and also it will reduce the amount of algae that you get
because this way you will always control how much light your aquarium is getting
and controlling the amount of light that your aquarium is getting
is one of the solutions to help you reduce algae
and believe me I had algae in my aquariums
but by using light timers I was able to fine tune the amount of lights
that these specific aquariums needed
and now I almost never get any more algae
the first timer that I'll be presenting today is just a standard manual timer
as you can see it is quite big; it's as big as my hand
and it's quite bulky
it uses a lot of space
and so when you'll be using it on a power strip for example
it's going to take a lot of space
potentially all this space
that's something that I don't really like
you can see that there's a dial that you can use that you can turn and actually the pins
will be turning the on off button which will turn off or on the lights
you can also use this on off button to turn on and off the lights manually
to control how much time you use
you will control it by moving these plugs
this way you control as let's say
you want two hours well then you'll just put it in for two hours
if you want more
then you'll just put it more
it's as easy as that
and now with this timer as you can see right now the light is on
I'll just put it way back there so you can see
you can manually control it with the piece at the top
so turn it it's off now and now it's on
and so with the dial this one, this first one, is going to turn on the light and the second one is going to turn it off
there it's closed then we turn it again and then
it's turned on and that's how these timers work
this type of timer also comes built-in into some power cords
the next timer is the digital timer
these timers are mostly used outside and are thus more waterproof
the thing that I love about these timers is that since they are waterproof and are tight
you can use them in the fish room without being too worried about water getting to it
cool thing about these timers too is that usually you have this extension cord
which when you plug it into your light strip will make it so that you don't use up all
you don't use all of the entries and also as you can see there's also even two spots
so if you have two aquariums you could set up two lights on this one and only timer
they're called digital because you'll have this small screen which will help you
to program the timer itself
I won't go into much of the details because usually these programs
they can be different between different brands
they'll simply work as you'll plug in your lights they'll turn on
since that's the program and usually you have a button that you can press to either turn it off
or turn it back on and you'll have your other button this one you could use to program it
now for the last timer I'll be talking about smart plugs
so smart plugs are really neat
they work with either bluetooth or wi-fi
this one is actually from the brand Kasa lite
and this one will work with wi-fi this is great because you can use
it with your phone and you can program all of your different lights
from the app
they're also small which means that you can just plug it into your power strip and
it's not going to use all of the space on your power strips
most of them will come with a small button that you can press to turn on or turn off the lights
as a quick demonstration plug in the lights
as you can see they're on then I'll just press this button to turn off and then turn on
this is my fluval flex 15 gallon and as you can see it's plugged in with a smart timer
to control the lights I use the app where you can see all of my other aquariums that use these timers
I can select each and every timer and put a different schedule on them if I want
I showed earlier that you can press a button on the timer to turn
off or on the lights but you can also do this with the app
and if you have multiple aquariums you can use one timer that you put
onto the wall and then you will plug in your power cord into the timer
this way you could use a lot of lights on one single power strip this is mostly useful
if you have a lot of aquariums
thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next one