Not to hijack but, have you guys that have MH seen a huge jump in your electric bill? About how much?
It's going to be a simply matter of math. Has the Aquarium as a whole increased my electric bill, YES!! but no hobby I have found that I enjoy is cheap.
I am going up about 300 watts I think. I pay 10.4 cents per kilowatt hour. Right now, It costs just under 10 cents per hour to run everything. It will cost about 14 cents an hour to run with the lights on. I need to pick up a kill-a-watt but I have actually been waiting until I get the new Neptune Apex controller. I think it has that feature is built right in.
In the grand scheme of things, if I would unplug laptops, computers and all those ghost appliances, I'd save more than enough to pay for it. When I see $600 plus electric bills here in North Texas in the summer, the couple extra $ in lights ain't gonna make a difference.
I am sure that the heat generated from these will require the AC to run more but again, it is common for the upstairs AC unit to run for 16 hours and the downstairs run for 20 hours during the dead of summer.