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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.
I saw an attempt at a similar thing posted on Hacker News in the past. Rather than use many standard lightbulbs, he used one massive 30,000 lumen "corn cob" bulb: https://www.benkuhn.net/lux Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21660718 However, there is now an update on the blog where he seems to have independently switched to the "lumenator" system as described in the links on today's post: > Update…
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...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you seen any options that don’t require a fat tube running through the house?
Definitely the problem to solve. I thought about splitting this up into hundreds of optical fiber filaments. These could fit in wall elements or next to other pipe elements.
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.
No need to feel bad. Those two didn’t actually “invent” the idea of bright lighting. It’s not a creditable idea, really.
But this isn't really just a question of "bright lighting", which of course occurs outdoors all the time, anywhere someone is doing arc welding, in any steel mill, etc. It's a more complex proposition: "Possibly seasonal affective disorder is due in significant part to the fact that indoor lighting is almost always orders of magnitude dimmer than sunlight. Possibly indoor lighting is so dim in part because providing sunlight-class lighting with Edison's incandescent lights would be punishingly expensive and require data-center-style massive air conditioning. However, modern high-efficiency LEDs and even fluorescent tubes bring sunlight-class lighting within practical reach of everyday people."
Still, this is hardly a brilliantly original idea on my part, so it's not surprising that the same idea occurred to Eliezer. I was pleased to see that he tried it for his wife's SAD and that it worked.
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.
Power waste is an issue - at times where there is oversupply, wholesale power prices can actually go negative and at that point there is an excess of power in the network which cannot be stored and if it's not consumed will lead to electrical damage. So people actually get paid to waste power. Ever seen a sports stadium with all the lights blazing late at night even though noone is there? They are one of the groups who take advantage of negative power prices. There are also places where there are literally resistors placed along the ground to sink excess electricity (as heat) into the earth during these times.
When you say "eventually they will make it cheap" that seems likely to be a misconception also. Power production is not like manufacturing. Although innovation can lead to increases in efficiency and therefore reduced cost, inefficiency is not the limiting factor on power cost.
DIY Perks [1] has a good tutorial on how to make a super bright LED panel from LED strips. Quite easily, actually. Been using one of those in my office for the last eight years or so. I use a server PSU for power. I was surprised to see how bright it is when I once went outside while it was on. Not only was my window the brightest in the entire street by far. But it actually illuminated the trees around my window. If…
For your sunset approximation, you could add some warmer ones and fade over; they also have some dual-color strips with two different color temperatures evenly spread to allow for seamless mixing.
However, 10klux seems a bit too much, given the energy needed to drive the lamps and overall lamp brightness. Too much light can also have negative effects on the eye and moreover, you would just be unable to read your screen well at 10klux.
This has been applied for decades. Those 'ceiling windows' in art galleries are often false windows with bright daylight lamps beneath it. By the way, the sun produces ~50.000 lux on earth's surface. That's 100 times more than in a wall illuminated office. To reach that brightness, you would need tens of kilowatts of LED lightning for medium and larger sized rooms. That's totally infeasible. Also, imagine the heat bu…
This has been applied for decades. Those 'ceiling windows' in art galleries are often false windows with bright daylight lamps beneath it. By the way, the sun produces ~50.000 lux on earth's surface. That's 100 times more than in a wall illuminated office. To reach that brightness, you would need tens of kilowatts of LED lightning for medium and larger sized rooms. That's totally infeasible. Also, imagine the heat bu…