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Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

benkuhn.net

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Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#41

Post by jrockway »

spectramax wrote: post #22
abakker wrote: post #16

I’ve got 5 of these in my office. https://www.superbrightleds.com/moreinfo/industrial-led-ligh... . They are fantastic. I have several more of the longer fluorescent replacements in my wood shop. More light is magnificently better for energy and productivity in pretty much all environments. I would still prefer skylights to bulbs, but these are a good solution for dark rooms.

Have you checked the CRI? Its not bad but not great either - 84 as per the specs. There are a lot of Chinese cheap LED fixtures available on Amazon and no one seems to care about the CRI - it defines how colors appear in your room.

I bought some LEDs on Amazon and uploaded charts showing the wavelength distribution. The LEDs were awful and the charts made it very clear why. Amazon deleted my review and the item currently has 5 stars.

The best lights I have are some warm white LED strips from eBay. I glued them to the top of my workbench (it's a desk under some shelves basically) and it is a joy to work there. I measured them and they are pretty close to daylight in terms of CRI, something like 93 if I recall correctly.

The only thing that makes me unhappy is the current state of LED strip driving. I have a device that takes 120VAC and turns it into 12V for the light strips. It "interprets" the output of a triac dimmer in front of it to PWM the LEDs. Very wasteful and stupid, but there are no constant-current drivers that just let you use something to adjust the current output unless you build your own. (A friend of mine did just that; the lights are amazing.) PWM naturally causes the cheap capacitors in the DC/DC converter to make noise, so I pretty much never dim them.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#42

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

The corn cob bulbs are very hard on the eyes unless you have some kind of diffuser.

I found a better solution is a 1 to 7 bulb splitter with 7 150W equivalent bulbs for a total of about 15000 lumens.

https://www.amazon.com/8T8-Splitter-Standard-Converter-Comme...

I'd be curious trying a spotlight (something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Primelux-8-inch-14400-Lumens-Driving/...) that is farther away from me.

The parallel rays of a spotlight would probably look and feel more sun like compared to the radial rays of normal bulbs.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#43

Post by codingdave »

> The lamp flickers when other current-hungry appliances turn on

That should not happen. There is likely a problem somewhere in the electrical system. We used to have similar problems in our home, hired an electrician to help track it down... they gave our home a clean bill of health, but called the city... long story short, they found a problem in a transformer a couple blocks away from us. It had been impacting many homes, and they were shocked nobody had call it in as a problem before us. But apparently, everyone just thought, "Oh, flickers are normal when appliances kick on, right?"

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#44

Post by jrockway »

keyle wrote: post #17

Many offices, mostly in places like Amsterdam, Paris etc. in art-deco building, take pride in the amount of natural light they're pumping in the office. With mirrors and sunroofs (with sails as shade) and a few plants, you can really give a beautiful, open air feeling to your office. This, feels like crutches. edit: there is something to be said about starting an hour earlier and finishing an hour earlier if the suns…

You're going to be awake for 16 hours on the average day. We get 9 hours of daylight a day in New York in the winter, so some portion of that is going to be spent in darkness no matter how wonderful your windows are.

In the summer, things are much better; 16 hours of daylight. So you really can put yourself on a schedule where the appearance of light wakes you up and its disappearance puts you to sleep.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#45

Post by saagarjha »

codingdave wrote: post #43

> The lamp flickers when other current-hungry appliances turn on That should not happen. There is likely a problem somewhere in the electrical system. We used to have similar problems in our home, hired an electrician to help track it down... they gave our home a clean bill of health, but called the city... long story short, they found a problem in a transformer a couple blocks away from us. It had been impacting man…

Is it not? I thought the motors inside of them caused that to happen?

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#46

Post by flypaca »

MiroF wrote: post #35
keyle wrote: post #17

Many offices, mostly in places like Amsterdam, Paris etc. in art-deco building, take pride in the amount of natural light they're pumping in the office. With mirrors and sunroofs (with sails as shade) and a few plants, you can really give a beautiful, open air feeling to your office. This, feels like crutches. edit: there is something to be said about starting an hour earlier and finishing an hour earlier if the suns…

You don't live in Boston, so you don't understand. It's dark by 4-4:15 here

It gets dark in Amsterdam around the same time as well. And Amsterdam overall gets less sunlight as it is much more north than Boston.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#47

Post by benkuhn »

philip1209 wrote: post #34

I have a one-person office with glass walls in a coworking space. I've been looking for a lighting option that could possibly go above or below my monitor. I like the bulbs in this article, but I would prefer something directional so that I don't disturb my neighbors. Any suggestions?

If a 120-degree cone is good enough for you, try searching for "high bay lights"? E.g.: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=high+bay+lights

If you're willing to pay more for much better color rendering than mine, my coworker got excited about these: https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/high-cri-led-lights/p...

Note that it's 1/3 the lumens of my corn bulb, but the smaller angle means the lux may be about the same (or you might need more--I haven't tried these).

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#48

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

morsch wrote: post #27
Scoundreller wrote: post #3

> Isn’t this expensive to run? It draws about 2 kWh per day (assuming 8h of usage), which costs about $0.30 at typical rates. This is comparable to one day of a modern fridge or one load of laundry. Power is cheap, folks! But it will offset your other heat sources. If you live alone, you can treat it like a room heater and lower the temperature for the rest of your home. Since the bulb is radiating heat some degree o…

2 kWh is kind of nuts. Yes, it's in the same order of magnitude than the fridge and washing machine, but those already tend to be the largest consumers of electricity in a household, unless you're doing cooling or heating with electrity. And a modern fridge suitable for 2 to 3 persons will be more like 0.5 kWh per day and a load of laundry is < 1 kWh.

And if you're trying to light your whole house this way you may need three or four of these bulbs. I guess you'd just keep whichever is in the room you're in on though.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#49

Post by codingdave »

saagarjha wrote: post #45
codingdave wrote: post #43

> The lamp flickers when other current-hungry appliances turn on That should not happen. There is likely a problem somewhere in the electrical system. We used to have similar problems in our home, hired an electrician to help track it down... they gave our home a clean bill of health, but called the city... long story short, they found a problem in a transformer a couple blocks away from us. It had been impacting man…

Is it not? I thought the motors inside of them caused that to happen?

Not according to the electricians who fixed it for my neighborhood.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#50

Post by [deleted] »

morsch wrote: post #27
Scoundreller wrote: post #3

> Isn’t this expensive to run? It draws about 2 kWh per day (assuming 8h of usage), which costs about $0.30 at typical rates. This is comparable to one day of a modern fridge or one load of laundry. Power is cheap, folks! But it will offset your other heat sources. If you live alone, you can treat it like a room heater and lower the temperature for the rest of your home. Since the bulb is radiating heat some degree o…

2 kWh is kind of nuts. Yes, it's in the same order of magnitude than the fridge and washing machine, but those already tend to be the largest consumers of electricity in a household, unless you're doing cooling or heating with electrity. And a modern fridge suitable for 2 to 3 persons will be more like 0.5 kWh per day and a load of laundry is < 1 kWh.

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