Traditionally, when you’re preparing mares for breeding or want to keep your performance horses from growing thick winter coats, you’d turn to your barn’s lighting for a solution. Leaving barn lights on overnight through the winter simulates the longer days of summer, tricking horses’ bodies and preventing some of their winter physical responses.

But leaving all of the lights on in your barn has its disadvantages, too, including a hefty electric bill. Equilume offers some practical and fascinating alternatives.

Equilume Stable Light

The Equilume Stable Light is based on the same idea of leaving your barn lights on, but it offers some distinct advantages. This light helps to minimize electricity costs and still allows horses to get undisturbed sleep at night. The key is the various types of light that it emits. A blue-enriched light during the day helps to boost activity, metabolism, and alertness. It can also help to reduce bacterial growth, making your barn a healthier environment. At night, a red light allows your horse to enjoy his normal circadian rhythm.

A dim up and dim down feature at both dawn and dusk simulate the natural light changes that would occur, creating a natural feeling environment for your horse.

Equilume Light Mask

The Equilume Light Mask is an individual headpiece that allows you to provide tailored light therapy to individual horses. It delivers timed blue light to one eye through an eye cup. This blue light therapy can help to extend a stallion’s fertility and breeding season length. It also helps to advance the breeding season in mares and can help to increase a mare’s fertility after foaling. Additionally, this mask is ideal for performance horses, since it can stimulate optimum coat condition.

This mask offers many benefits. It’s a way to deliver targeted blue light to only certain horses in a barn, saving on electricity costs. The eye cup is waterproof and the blue light is on a timer, so you don’t have to worry about turning lights on and off at certain times.

This mask also allows horses to live outdoors while still receiving the effects of light therapy. This can cut down on bedding costs, potentially reduce the risk of health issues like colic and respiratory problems, and help to prevent boredom and resulting stall vices.

A Wise Investment

Both the Equilume Light Mask and the Equilume Stable Light deliver plenty of advantages when incorporated into a breeding or performance horse management program. Just a handful of those benefits include:

• Increasing fertility
• Advancing and extending the breeding season
• Improving coat condition
• Promoting faster winter shedding and saving you time clipping
• Stimulating appetite

If you’re looking for an alternative to relying on your stable lights to manage coats and breeding seasons, it might be time to consider these products. They can help you to save money over the cost of lighting an entire stable and give you more choices in how you manage your breeding and performance horses through the winters.