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…
He also created a version that simulates sunlight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw
Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
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Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even high-end bulbs flicker badly when dimmed. Dimming is crap. I'll go so far as to say it causes subconscious anxiety and stress — obviously negating any positive effect the light brings. I rotate my hands quickly between my eyes and the lights when I'm at a store to look for strobing when dimmed. Any strobing and I am not on board. > Maybe flickering all the LEDs in the array with different phases would fix this…
> Dimming is crap. Agreed LED dimming is crap, but incandescent is not so bad. Mainly because it dims toward red, simulating the day -> sunset -> fire transition. Apart from flickering, my gripe with LED is that it stays a constant color which looks unnatural even with a 2700K bulb.
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#223When I lived in Seattle, my solution was a 2’ square fluorescent panel I got from a gardening supply place called “The Indoor Sun Shop”. I grew up in the South and got real bad seasonal depression up there; it probably saved my life. I paid all of $300 for it. Plus like twenty bucks for a mechanical timer, because I discovered that there were a lot of mornings where I was too depressed and mopey to turn it on myself.…
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Warmth" and "naturalness" are produced by high CRI index (90+). I have 8 lamps with CRI 90+ in my living room, at 5000K color temperature, 1500 lumens each. They produce nice light that seamlessly mixes with daytime sunlight from the window: they seem to have the same color. I also have a few LED strip installation over desks and tables, very bright at max dimmer setting. A diffuser is a must, even though it lowers…
Quick guide to CRI 90-95: Can be ok, or not. Depends. Different lights will likely not mix at the same color temperature. 98: Good 99-100 full spectrum cyberlight: As good as Halogen and only ~30x as expensive.
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#225This 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…
'Overcast February day in London' is only 5,000 lux at the surface, according to my lux meter. You could achieve that with 750W of LEDs. Of course, that is still quite a lot of power.
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#226Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#227As a start, I've started https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/ and been going on stretches of doing laptop work outside more. By having a setup where you've either got the screen closer to the face (less glare) or an e-ink display, I've managed being outside for up to a few hours.
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#228Very related to this, I've been trying to relocate a video about "making a sun in a box" where the creator does the following: - goes over power and lumens, basic wiring for a bare LED. - details how the color of light matters. - instructs how to measure the focal length of a fresnel lens for parallel light rays. - how to make an appropriately sized box that can be stacked in both directions to crate a "window" effec…
This isn't quite what you're looking for, but this has some of what you're looking for, which is how to get the "parallel light effect" that the sun has, so it doesn't look like a bulb, and diffuses properly: https://youtu.be/6bqBsHSwPgw Hope this helps a little.
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#229When I lived in Seattle, my solution was a 2’ square fluorescent panel I got from a gardening supply place called “The Indoor Sun Shop”. I grew up in the South and got real bad seasonal depression up there; it probably saved my life. I paid all of $300 for it. Plus like twenty bucks for a mechanical timer, because I discovered that there were a lot of mornings where I was too depressed and mopey to turn it on myself.…
I won't cite, but only because i don't have a way to index my personal PDF repository, but the common consensus among people who study such things is that anyone living above the 20th parallel (or below, technically) absolutely must supplement vitamin D3, as even a full day in the sun naked is not enough to synthesize the amount of D3 we need.
So with that in mind, I'd honestly expect more people to know this and be supplementing D3. I don't have any specific recommendations, but i do know some guidelines and recent discoveries into "max dosing", so here they are. Anecdotally, i take 5000-6000iu every two days. I have a weird sleeping schedule so i really only notice "a day" as the sort of fog and fatigue i get after having gone more than 30 hours without D3. Prior to about 2015 or so, the max dosage was in the sub-5000iu range, with most supplement's labels stating that 500-1000iu was the "RDA" for D3.
However since covid was exponentially responsible for research into literally anything that could help alleviate symptoms/the disease and accelerate the time to recovery, some doctors were giving extremely high iu, up to 250,000iu over the course of a few days, or single doses of 50,000-80,000iu, with no deleterious effects reported.
Personally, unless i actually get sick, i try to stay under 8000-10000iu, at least until someone does a longitudinal study about the long term effects of doses higher than that.
As to the article and your point about lights helping - i've never noticed anything about any sort of light. I can feel awful at noon on a clear day while outside, or awful inside under every light type imaginable. I'm glad that light (and types of lights) help some people. I just think that the root cause is D3 deficiency, and no amount of 20k lumen arrays is really going to help.
As a quick aside, if you want to supplement children with D3 i recommend finding chewable d3 or a childrens multi-vitamin with omega-3/6 fatty acids. A couple of studies (with decent N and correlations) showed that merely supplementing omegas in children's diets improved the relationship and overall wellbeing of the children's parents - you read me right, parents didn't have to supplement to get the benefits of the children supplementing.