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Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

lincolnquirk.com

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Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#2
I made some notes about this in 02013 https://dercuano.github.io/notes/10klux-led.html and 02017 https://dercuano.github.io/notes/illumination-cost.html which may be of interest to anyone trying this, but Eliezer and Raemon tried the experiment and published their notes before I published Dercuano in 02019.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#3
It’s not that crazy of an idea especially in winter when SAD is worst and any extra power you waste in your house heats it so it isn’t really wasted.

One of my favorite places on earth is my marijuana grow and the incredible amount of beautiful light they grow under. I’ve contemplated a scaled down version in my house. I could grow plants all over the place under the lighting like being outside, no matter what the season.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#5

It’s not that crazy of an idea especially in winter when SAD is worst and any extra power you waste in your house heats it so it isn’t really wasted. One of my favorite places on earth is my marijuana grow and the incredible amount of beautiful light they grow under. I’ve contemplated a scaled down version in my house. I could grow plants all over the place under the lighting like being outside, no matter what the se…

Power waste is not an issue even in summer. Power production is driven by demand. Turn on more lights, and electricity companies will produce more electricity, and eventually they will make it cheap. Turn off the lights, and they'll do nothing because there's no demand.

That was my pitch for nuclear power.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#6
I'm wondering if there are any thermal management issues to anticipate, especially if you wanna build a safe commercial product. It's quite known that the limit to LED brightness rapidly becomes heat management, either of the power supply or the LED itself.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#7
https://www.day-lite.com/ already exists, for a lot cheaper than the author's estimates (no one is paying $1000+ for some bright bulbs).

Here's some more:

https://www.superbrightleds.com/moreinfo/decorative-ceiling-....

https://www.amazon.com/Artika-Residential-Ultra-Thin-Dimmabl...

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#8
Interesting to see someone else working on the problem of bright indoor lighting. I've been searching for a good solution to the "indoor light not bright enough" problem for some time, and here's some stuff I've tried:

-IKEA NOT ($10 floor lamp) lights with a bunch of light bulb splitters and at least two giant high-CRI twister CFL bulbs for photo studios from Amazon. These are truly massive and look like a normal CFL light bulb, but are about a foot long. Two of them consume 130W at the wall, and put out a rather large amount of light. Managed to get about 1000 lux at the desk this way. Unfortunately you can only get them in 5000K and 6500K. The daylight color may bother some people at night. Furthermore, they are undimmable.

-Track lighting with six IKEA TRADFRI tunable white bulbs on it, in an L shape following my desk. IKEA bulbs supposedly reach 90 CRI, and these can be color tuned (arbitrarily if you use the hub and the HomeKit app, not just 3 levels) and dimmed. At 1000lm, they are the brightest tunable white bulbs on the market commonly imo (most are 800). The range of color tuning is rather low, 2700-4000K. This is because the bulb never turns off the warm channel I think. Furthermore, at 4000K, the light is slightly greenish.

Some notes:

-I definitely find dimmable and/or color tunable bulbs to be useful, because at night, extremely bright or white light isn't extremely helpful for sleep.

-I found that high room brightness might make it difficult to see a computer screen that isn't turned up all the way.

-I found that if the lights were mounted overhead-ish, and were really individually bright, they would cause annoying glare under some circumstances

Some more hardware developmenty stuff I looked into:

-LED strips. High CRI tunable white LED strips are available on AliExpress, along with the LED channels to run them. Actually getting a constant current supply and appropriate power rigged up is an exercise left for the reader. Unfortunately, LED strips use resistors for constant current, so waste a little bit of power there.

-Building a custom LED plate for the Tradfri lights that used Lumileds chips capable of 95 CRI. I built and tested one, and still have the files if someone should want to try. It doesn't expand the tuning range much at all.

-Designing my own LED bulbs. This is a project in progress. I found some LED chips on DigiKey from Bridgelux (V6 Thrive array) and some giant BR40 bulbs at a local store for 3 bucks each that still have a massive heat sink on them to modify. The heat sink gets up to 60C with 18W input to the LEDs at 25C ambient. The LED chips are capable of outputting 98 CRI and come much closer to approximating sunlight than anything else I've found by wavelength/spectrum.

Hopefully someone finds something here useful.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#9
This is pitched as (1) a treatment for SAD and (2) something people would like.

And that's great, but I want to consider something else -- one of the best theories of civilization-caused myopia is that it's caused by insufficient exposure to sunlight. And the table in the post is certainly circumstantial evidence supporting that theory:

> Direct sunlight shines 100k lux

> Full daylight (indirect) is more than 10k lux

> Indoor office lighting is typically 500

That's a big difference. What if illuminating the indoors at 10,000 lux prevented people from developing myopia?

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#10
The fellow from the YouTube channel DIY Perks has several projects dealing with this, including an amazing parallel-ray "sun", and other projects recycling old TV and laptop screens into fake windows.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOJU8YJjFwGN0hMRewz2_u2Ie...

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