Diurnal ham?

[gout]

My siberian hamster Nugget has a tenancy to scurry around and make more noise than what I'm used to falling asleep around, and she can get cranky when I try to handle her during the daytime, so I started trying to make him diurnal by leaving my room dark during the day. Will this work?

[Flamestriker]

Some hamsters come out during the day my Syrian did this morning, but she went back to bed after said cuddle. Waking a ham in the day is like someone waking us up at 2am...I'm sure you would get cranky too. Can you move his cage to another part of the house or purchase a quieter wheel? Karlies are great, although my Syrian has outgrown the 20cm one.

Squeak has a 12inch flying saucer and my robos have a mini ss and saucer. Squeak has the iMac again but il sleep tonight because I'm used to it. When they all go quiet I wake up.

[KatiePillow]

I don't think that it'd be healthy for them to be swapped, they need sunlight, and I think a 12 hour day-night pattern.
I had a diurnal hamster, he would wake up at 6am, be awake still at 10am and go to bed sometime while i was out, but he was blind - so think that might have caused it.
Even if they do become diurnal, they might wake up during work hours, or while you're out of the house.
I don't tend to wake my hamsters up unless it's about 11pm and I haven't seen them all evening, and they're at risk of me going to bed, and even then if they don't want to come out it's not really fair to force them..

[StarlightSerenity]

I agree with Katie - it's not healthy. I don't think it would actually work either - my bedroom curtain is usually shut (one of us is usually asleep during the day) and Luna never wakes up. The light tends to be on during the night most nights as well which doesn't stop her from getting up.

Your best bet would be to try and encourage her to wake up at a certain time each evening (waking her up at a certain time each evening, letting her wake up a bit then handle her, no one wants to be man handled as soon as they wake up).

Hamsters make noise during the night - that's not something that you can prevent and should be taken into account when considering getting a hamster. Could you move her into a different room so that she doesn't disturb your sleep? I don't know about anyone else here but I've come used to the night noises and really notice it (and have trouble sleeping) when she's quiet or I'm sleeping in the spare bedroom.

[kyrilliondaemon]

Yeah, we try and avoid waking ours before 10pm, and even then if they object to being woken and try to go back to bed we'll let them. Its not fair to be woken in the middle of your sleeping time, I er... didn't appreciate it... when my friends have sent texts at absurd hours and woken me at 3am, and I don't think its fair to do something similar to the hamsters.

Maybe try and get as quiet a wheel as possible and hope you get used to the other noises? Ours are usually pretty quiet and you do get used to it in the end.
Or yeah, move the hamster out of the room? We missed Scamp when we did that (only did it because we had the space anyway), but it might work fine for you

Oh and yeah, our curtains are very rarely open, it doesn't make a difference to the hamsters. Some of them show their faces once in a while during the day anyway, the others er... don't lol. It all depends on their individual sleeping patterns/habits, and we leave those up to the hamsters. Admittedly our curtains let in a lot of light, but even so... Unless you leave your light on all night to make up for the lack of light in the day, at best it will completely ruin their sleeping pattern and lead to them waking/sleeping at really random times, at worst it won't achieve anything, and either way you risk making them miserable.
If you really work at it you can change to make animals diurnal - but only by changing lighting times so that they get light at night and dark at day (and doing it an hours difference a day really helps with that change). Experiments have been done that prove it, but if they get constant darkness they just end up with completely sporadic, random sleeping times and no consistency at all.