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Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

benkuhn.net

111–120 of 317 posts

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#111
post #51

I usually eschew labels, preferring simply "sleep weirdo", but I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals. The result is that I'm often awake through the night. (This week I'm going to bed around 9:00 a.m.) Even with that, I've noticed some pretty big productivity swings based on the season. Interestingly, this hit me very h…

"I keep going back to halogen as the sweet-spot between black-body radiation and energy efficiency."

Permies put out an article arguing for incandescent if your goal is light AND warmth: From https://richsoil.com/electric-heat.jsp - "This last one was the most important. A standard incandescent light bulb heats something to the point that it glows white hot. So I used this to heat myself and it doubled as a light source. And, I should point out that in a few months this light bulb will be banned by the US government. It is already banned in many countries. The comedy is that it is being banned to save energy. And yet, I think people can save far more energy by keeping it."

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#112
post #51

I usually eschew labels, preferring simply "sleep weirdo", but I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals. The result is that I'm often awake through the night. (This week I'm going to bed around 9:00 a.m.) Even with that, I've noticed some pretty big productivity swings based on the season. Interestingly, this hit me very h…

I absolutely hate LEDs. I don't know why, but I just hate them. Especially the white ones. The yellower are similar to a mid summer day and I can cope with them, but there's always this feeling of something being off. I guess it's connected to us humans being used to non-sun light being (similar to) a fire - mainly consisting of yellow/orange tones. Also, I don't exactly remember from where I read this, but when a (t…

I've recently got amber ones, at around 2000k and they are such a pleasure. Many of them look like classic incandescent bulb too, imitating wires in normal bulb.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#113
post #2

i have seen articles about excessive blue light from led bulbs being bad for your long term eyesight i wonder if this has similar problems

When David Chapman's "You need more lumens" article came out (which is referenced in the original post), I was on the verge of building a similar setup but at some point read similar concerns on light therapy. Not necessarily effects on circadian rhythm, but retinal damage from staring close to the amount of light.

From https://meaningness.com/metablog/sad-light-lumens : "The clinical studies were done with 10,000 lux provided by a bank of fluorescent tubes in a box that directed most of the light forward. Very roughly, if you are a couple feet from a box like that, 1 lumen produces 1 lux." It'd be interesting to see studies that have these lighting setups but don't involve staring towards them.

The setup that I'm happy enough with: a set of LIFX bulbs in normal light fixtures. They seem to put out more lumens (1100 lumens) than other color-changing led bulbs. If you don't want 'smart' lighting but still want the ability to change color temperature, Philips makes "SceneSwitch" lights (800 lumens) that will cycle color temperature based on turning on/off.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#114
post #51

I usually eschew labels, preferring simply "sleep weirdo", but I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals. The result is that I'm often awake through the night. (This week I'm going to bed around 9:00 a.m.) Even with that, I've noticed some pretty big productivity swings based on the season. Interestingly, this hit me very h…

"I keep going back to halogen as the sweet-spot between black-body radiation and energy efficiency." Permies put out an article arguing for incandescent if your goal is light AND warmth: From https://richsoil.com/electric-heat.jsp - "This last one was the most important. A standard incandescent light bulb heats something to the point that it glows white hot. So I used this to heat myself and it doubled as a light sou…

yup. like my low flow toilet that i need to flush twice...

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#115
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely hate LEDs. I don't know why, but I just hate them. Especially the white ones. The yellower are similar to a mid summer day and I can cope with them, but there's always this feeling of something being off. I guess it's connected to us humans being used to non-sun light being (similar to) a fire - mainly consisting of yellow/orange tones. Also, I don't exactly remember from where I read this, but when a (t…

> I absolutely hate LEDs. I don't know why, but... I'm really interested in the why . Most people don't seem to care. My in-laws have CFLs in their living room that just feel horrible to me, but they're none the wiser. I'm very curious as to what it is in the light spectrum that seems to matter to some (small) class of people, myself, and it sounds like you, included. The word for "fire-like" light, used in my origin…

> I'm really interested in the why. Most people don't seem to care. My in-laws have CFLs in their living room that just feel horrible to me, but they're none the wiser.

My first suspicion would be the spectrum of light emitted, which is mostly reflected in the CRI [1].

CFLs in particular "cheat" by having a couple really strong peaks of very specific wavelengths that to your eyes (or reflecting off a white surface) look like the right color, but when reflecting off anything they have reproduce colors inaccurately -- it's beyond my ability to explain this in detail, but you can see this in some spectrum charts [2].

LEDs vary greatly in this respect, so if you're concerned, you should really be paying close attention to the CRI (and note, as CRI goes up, so does cost).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index

[2] https://www.ledsmaster.com/color-rendering-index-cri-versus-...

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#116
Light temp is mentioned. It's worth looking at CRI which gives you an indication of how much of the spectrum is represented. E.g. 18,000 watt HMI lights for film are tungsten (3200k) and have a CRI of 99 which is insanely good. But they're 18000 watts. Many high output low watt LEDs have horrendous gaps in the spectrum.

Unfortunately to test CRI you need a $1500 color meter. I'm lucky enough to have one and access to a range of film lights and it's crazy how much CRI varies and the horrendous gaps in the spectrum for some lights.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#117
post #51

I usually eschew labels, preferring simply "sleep weirdo", but I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals. The result is that I'm often awake through the night. (This week I'm going to bed around 9:00 a.m.) Even with that, I've noticed some pretty big productivity swings based on the season. Interestingly, this hit me very h…

> I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals.

This is a disorder now? I thought that's just how humans worked. It's how I work, anyway - if nothing else (like work, or children waking up at 5:30am) forces me to get up at a set time, I'll slowly cycle through until I'm going to bed at sun-up and waking up at 3pm.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we were building out an office that only had a few windows I went looking for, and found one of these. Unfortunately it’s $60k instead of $2k. According to reviewers that saw it, it’s amazing. Apparently it uses some nanoscale material that produces (mimics?) Rayleigh scattering. https://www.vox.com/2015/2/18/8060673/skylight-artificial-li...

I don't think the trick is the Rayleigh scattering, I think it's the parallel rays. Notice how all the pictures have well defined shadows of parallel rays?

I started to look into this and from a brief readings of the patents it seems that the magic sauce is Rayleigh scattering by shining an LED light onto a sandwich of two transparent panels and a solid layer of silica aerogel. I couldn't find the thickness of the aerogel layer, which will determine if you get more blue or red light out of the sandwich.

It's quite ingenious, the aerogel consists of silica nanoparticles with a size distribution smaller than the wavelength of the light, leading to Rayleigh scattering to dominate. The non-uniformity of the aerogel structure is what gives it the more nuanced lighting, it lets a bit of yellow light, a bit of this and that, making a non-monochromatic source that resembles sunlight very well.

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