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Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

benkuhn.net

101–110 of 317 posts

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#101

> The lamp flickers when other current-hungry appliances turn on That should not happen. There is likely a problem somewhere in the electrical system. We used to have similar problems in our home, hired an electrician to help track it down... they gave our home a clean bill of health, but called the city... long story short, they found a problem in a transformer a couple blocks away from us. It had been impacting man…

Is it not? I thought the motors inside of them caused that to happen?

If you got enough of a draw from one device in your house that lights flicker, the safety switch should probably trigger.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you checked the CRI? Its not bad but not great either - 84 as per the specs. There are a lot of Chinese cheap LED fixtures available on Amazon and no one seems to care about the CRI - it defines how colors appear in your room.

I bought some LEDs on Amazon and uploaded charts showing the wavelength distribution. The LEDs were awful and the charts made it very clear why. Amazon deleted my review and the item currently has 5 stars. The best lights I have are some warm white LED strips from eBay. I glued them to the top of my workbench (it's a desk under some shelves basically) and it is a joy to work there. I measured them and they are pretty…

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Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#104
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…

Unless you source high quality LED luminaires, they look terrible let alone flicker... most of the shit on amazon is just that unfortunately.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#106
post #89
post #82

There are a bunch of calculations about this in Dercuano, in particular based on indoor-growing setups, but with a chair in them instead of a plant pot. It turns out that fluorescent tubes or especially halogen bulbs are cheaper than LEDs, and at the small scale of a desk and chair, the extra energy is affordable. One big problem for hackers is that very few screens are readable even in 10klux, let alone 100klux dire…

What about transreflective displays? Annoyingly I've still not seen one IRL. They go black and white, apparently, but are still 100% legible.

I've been positively impressed with the readability of OLPC XOs in sunlight, which I think are what you're talking about. It's too bad they weren't willing to consider a capitalist rather than communist model for making them available; I think they would have been popular. I think there are also color transflective displays but I've only seen them in photos.

E-ink displays are even better than the XO, and machines with them are much more easily available, but most of them only come in the surveillance-capitalist hood-welded-shut model. They use orders of magnitude less energy than transflective LCDs for some usage patterns, but refresh slowly.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#107
post #19
post #17

Many offices, mostly in places like Amsterdam, Paris etc. in art-deco building, take pride in the amount of natural light they're pumping in the office. With mirrors and sunroofs (with sails as shade) and a few plants, you can really give a beautiful, open air feeling to your office. This, feels like crutches. edit: there is something to be said about starting an hour earlier and finishing an hour earlier if the suns…

When it gets dark by 3:30pm and there’s so much cloud cover it never gets past dusk, you’ll appreciate the crutches. Biggest downside to living in seattle atm.

Ugh yeah I wanted to kill myself more and more every year I spent in Seattle. Moved somewhere sunnier and that urge just vanished.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#109
post #88

> The lamp flickers when other current-hungry appliances turn on That should not happen. There is likely a problem somewhere in the electrical system. We used to have similar problems in our home, hired an electrician to help track it down... they gave our home a clean bill of health, but called the city... long story short, they found a problem in a transformer a couple blocks away from us. It had been impacting man…

Wait. This isn't normal?! I have the exact same thing happen here. Whenever the bathroom heat lamp (well, lamps - 2 x 275W, 240V) turns on, I clearly see the lights in whatever room I'm in dip for maybe 10ms. This used to happen with the old incandescent lamps from years back, but still happens with the newer CCFL types too. Has never not happened. Huh. Something to keep in mind, particularly for whenever I'm in an e…

I have the same issue every time the air compressor is turned on.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#110
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…

Try some of these:

[1] https://www.osram.de/ecat/Professional%20LED-Lampen%20mit%20...

[2] https://www.osram.com/ecat/Professional%20LED%20lamps%20with...

They work fine for me, while i'm considering myself sensitive to all sorts of flickering, or "strange" colors. Don't be afraid of the "professional", they aren't much more expensive, 8 to 9€ per piece instead of something like 4 to 6€ for the others. They make a warm light but are too bright to directly look into, even the candlelike things at only 2 Watts. I bought the first ones out of frustrations with broken CFLs maybe three to four years ago (not a single CFL lasted over a year!), their warmup times, noise, and such, as a test. Now the only other light i have is some flexible/movable Halogen spot light, which i rarely use. Anything else is that stuff from the links. It just works for me, while even saving some energy. So far no defects. Instant on. No noise. No flickering for me. They are commonly available. I got mine at the Bauhaus. Test one or two and see for yourself. Though you won't get a single thing with 500 Watts. They max out at 75W equivalent while using 8Watts. So you'd need many of them.

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