"Natural light" is one of the motivating reasons for open-plan offices, so practical artificial windows could help reverse that trend.
Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
11–20 of 294 posts
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#12DIY 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 I was to build it again - and especially for a place like living room - , I would build it so as to also simulate sunset. That is to say, that it will automatically lower the brightness and shift to a warmer spectrum in the evening. Otherwise, this thing messes with your biorhythm and gets you out of sync with normal daylight hours very quickly.
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#13I'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.
In LED lighting space, insufficient heat dissipation is commonly used for planned obsolescence. LED lifetime directly depends on temperature, and most light sources are way too powerful for their heat dissipation capabilities.
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#14There are many aquarium lighting companies that make these types of fixtures, because this intensity of lighting is exactly what people want to (and do) simulate over their aquariums (though generally at spectrums that are bluer than daylight)!
I think in terms of cost what the OP is not realizing is that when you are talking about hundreds of watts of LEDs, that is a lot of heat that is very concentrated. It takes a thoughtful design and active cooling to ensure the fixture is safe and the LEDs are kept at the proper temperates to maximize their life and performance. You don't really need to worry about active cooling when you have a few low wattage LED bulbs spread throughout a room. But cram a ton of them together in a small area and you absolutely do.
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#15I 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.
Why put leading zeroes in years?
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#16If you really want 100k lux in indoor spaces, it will cost rather a lot of electricity. It works out to 2300 kWh per day to light the average US home to sunlight brightness for 8 hours per day. So 75x the current typical electricity use!
If everyone wanted that, I don't think the nation could even produce that much power.
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#17It’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…
SAD, as in being “very sad”?
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#18It’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…
I’ve used horticultural fluorescents as indoor lighting. It was fairly pleasant.
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#19I 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.
Why put leading zeroes in years?
Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
#20It’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…
SAD, as in being “very sad”?
Seasonal Affective Disorder probably.