Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

bramadams.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 232 posts

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#161

Post by gregwebs »

lawkwok wrote: post #7

Phillips Hue lights are something you think is a luxury until you get them. The ability to have light change colour temperature or dim depending on the time is so calming. Whenever I revert back to the non—colour-temperature-adjusted light, I feel like I’m in an operating room. The only thing I would note is that they are dimmer than regular lights. Having dim lights in the middle of the day really makes me sleepy.

I bought Phillips Wix bulbs during Black Friday for much less than Hue bulbs. The Wix orange/yellow is underpowered but it works fine for us since we are using that at night anyways.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#162

Post by Nevermark »

I have worked at home my whole career. It was life changing when I discovered I could aim several LED shop lights at my ceilings (90,000 lumens total, in a vaulted living room) to create a summer day indoors, even on the dimmest cloudiest winter day.

When I remodeled my new home, I put 3 dimmable LED light strips around each ceiling, hidden above molding, so every ceiling is effectively a diffuse but high lumen light.

Then I use smart bulbs in accent lamps and other lighting, to add color for variety and mood.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#163

Post by marvin »

Auracle wrote: post #96
smcleod wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree, fantastic lights and worth every penny, their CRI is high enough to fill out the visible light spectrum nicely - you don't get any "indoor greys" and they seem to last forever, several of my bulbs are over 10 years old and still working perfectly.

I put one up in my photo studio because I wanted some 6500k lights, and there’s no way it was actually white at 6500k. I forget what color it was tinged with but it was super obvious. I suspect they’re only high CRI at certain color temperatures?

This is my impression too. I’m not good at photography, but it does seem quite un-white.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#164

Post by kmos17 »

elabajaba wrote: post #103
sampo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philips Hue: You can use the phone app to control individual bulbs directly with bluetooth, but for more control you need also the Hue brigde, which talks to the bulbs over Zigbee (a wireless protocol), and to your phone app over your wifi. For initial setup, the bridge needs an internet connection, but otherwise it will work as long as your home wifi is up, even if there is no connection to outside internet. The fea…

As someone who had Lifx due to them not needing a controller, don't buy them their software sucks. It worked fine for months at a time, but would then decide it no longer wanted to obey commands and you'd have to re-pair it, which usually took 30 minutes and 5 failed attempts where it would fail during the setup process after resetting the bulb. Their bulbs also sometimes just ignored commands, so you'd have to just…

In my experience the ikea bulbs are also awful, constant unpairing requiring multiple attempts to re-pair with the remote, especially if you have multiple bulbs in close proximity. In the end I gave up and just use them as normal bulbs. It would be a nice setup if it worked though, having a dedicated remote control is much more convenient than using a phone imo.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#165

Post by marvin »

throwaway290 wrote: post #141
lawkwok wrote: post #7

Phillips Hue lights are something you think is a luxury until you get them. The ability to have light change colour temperature or dim depending on the time is so calming. Whenever I revert back to the non—colour-temperature-adjusted light, I feel like I’m in an operating room. The only thing I would note is that they are dimmer than regular lights. Having dim lights in the middle of the day really makes me sleepy.

Try incandescent bulbs. They're hard to come by these days but they give the coziest vibe, couldn't be further from a hospital. As a bonus, full-spectrum blackbody radiation (unlike patchy spectrums of all LEDs) and no PWM.

Love the contrarian tech take; go with the 1800s technology since it’s still superior in most of the ways that really matter ;)

I think this view has a lot going for it.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#166

Post by ehnto »

benreesman wrote: post #145
ehnto wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to assume you play games or watch YouTube, but on low DPI you also don't realise what you are missing in detail. Entire objects reveal themselves in this new space between the pixels. Where once was a splodge is now a person far off into the distance. You could almost liken low DPI to being near sighted, which I also am. Once you hit higher DPI suddenly you can see the view far off into the distance clearly. I ha…

Oh man, I never got into gaming because two of my brothers were so off-the-charts that I was like “why bother”. When I was like maybe 19 there was this Quake3 player who went by Zero4 who was in the top few on Earth at that time, and my 16 year old brother slapped him around so effortlessly during their biweekly workouts I knew that it was going to be more fun to watch than to be 1-px railed before I figured out whic…

I do hear that actually, my little brother plays and there is a pretty big age gap there, so he has unlimited energy and time and I do not. He plays so much better than I can manage, and I just don't have the time to commit to it anymore. I still play for fun though.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#167

Post by throw0101a »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #123
nostromo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason those didn’t matter so much in the past is because traditional light bulbs are so damn good. Even today, as good as LEDs have gotten, their color rendering is still noticeably worse than incandescents. (The highest scores are around 80-90 CRI, an old-fashioned bulb is the standard at 100.) Trouble dimming smoothly, harsh blues, flickering, strobing, excessive glare… all of these weren’t a problem until CFL…

> Even today, as good as LEDs have gotten, their color rendering is still noticeably worse than incandescents. (The highest scores are around 80-90 CRI, an old-fashioned bulb is the standard at 100.) This is false. Good quality LEDs are >90 CRI, and the higher end ones are 95+. These are not common because everyone is busy selling/buying the cheapest crap they can make/get, but they're definitely not hard to get eith…

> This is false.

> Good quality LEDs are >90 CRI, and the higher end ones are 95+.

High CRI is fine, but it's not something we should be completely satisfied with:

> R_a is the average value of R1–R8; other values from R9 to R15 are not used in the calculation of R_a, including R9 "saturated red", R13 "skin color (light)", and R15 "skin color (medium)", which are all difficult colors to faithfully reproduce. R9 is a vital index in high-CRI lighting, as many applications require red lights, such as film and video lighting, medical lighting, art lighting, etc. However, in the general CRI (R_a) calculation R9 is not included.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Special_...

> The most commonly used value of CRI is called Ra, which is the average value of the first eight indices (R1-R8). Lesser-known but more accurate is the extended CRI (Re), which uses the average value of R1-R15 and thus serves as a more accurate measure of color fidelity given that it takes the rendering of more colors into account.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-CRI_LED_lighting#CRI,_Ra_...

See:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Alternat...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_quality_scale

High CRI / Ra scores are fine for what they are, but they do not measure the entire 'colour reality', so when the GP says that CRI scores are 'lacking'—even ones in the 90s—they're not wrong. Current LEDs may match the CRI scores of incandescents, but incandescents may still produce results that are better outside of what CRI measures.

Of course this may only matter to those of us who remember incandescents: the younger you are the more likely you lived your life never experiencing incandescent, and so LED is "normal" and "fine".

Regardless: CRI was a decent place to start, but it'd be nice if we could collectively raise the bar.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#169

Post by pflanze »

clumsysmurf wrote: post #84
smcleod wrote: post #18

I'm surprised the author doesn't mention the importance of having high CRI lighting.

And not only CRI, but the absence of flicker ... which is surprisingly common even in LED bulbs.

Agreeing on the flicker. I don't think it's surprising that it's so common, though--undimmed lights are cheapest to power by not making proper DC out of the AC coming from the socket, and dimmed lights are cheapest to dim by slow PWM (pulsing ~100 times per second) without including inductors to flatten the pulses.

Re: Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health

#170

Post by halotrope »

Nevermark wrote: post #162

I have worked at home my whole career. It was life changing when I discovered I could aim several LED shop lights at my ceilings (90,000 lumens total, in a vaulted living room) to create a summer day indoors, even on the dimmest cloudiest winter day. When I remodeled my new home, I put 3 dimmable LED light strips around each ceiling, hidden above molding, so every ceiling is effectively a diffuse but high lumen light…

That sounds great, Can you recommend any specific parts?
Post reply on HN