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

Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

benkuhn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 317 posts

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#281

Post by rhinoceraptor »

gligorot wrote: post #68
wheels wrote: 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…

A lot of the LED bulbs out there are poor quality, they have bad CRI and they flicker. I’d be interested to know if you find high CRI LEDs better, especially warmer ones.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#282

Post by seltzered_ »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #170
seltzered_ wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I keep going back to halogen as the sweet-spot between black-body radiation and energy efficiency." Permies put out an article arguing for incandescent if your goal is light AND warmth: From https://richsoil.com/electric-heat.jsp - "This last one was the most important. A standard incandescent light bulb heats something to the point that it glows white hot. So I used this to heat myself and it doubled as a light sou…

Interesting, reminds me of several articles on this site. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/02/heating-people-not-s...

Yeah, love that article. I'm slowly building a large foldaway 'kotatsu' coffee table using a mixture of ikea (ovraryd) and amazon/ebay parts (foldaway hairpin legs, centerpost, kotatsu heater).

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#283

Post by solarkraft »

vinniejames wrote: post #249
herf wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we were looking at this quite a while ago. Lighting is a really hard business (especially residential) so we did not make the leap, and mainly have tried so far to work with people who are in that business. We thought back then that some form of "smart lighting" would be universal. This mostly hasn't happened, so the truth is that the opportunity is different than we had guessed. Today most "smart" replacement l…

Thanks for the info! Just learned about bias lighting from your blog post. Any chance we will see a non-root flux for Android?

While possible (there are tons of "blue filters" on the play store), the effect will always be considerably worse that with root access, since apps can only display overlays, not change the screen's white balance.

Btw, if you don't insist on using f.lux and have root access, take a look at cf.lumen: It allows much more precise configuration (I have it remove almost all blue in sleep mode).

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#284

Post by kazinator »

taneq wrote: post #79
kazinator wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might not be noticeable, or as noticeable, with a 150W incandescent bulb, which has thermal inertia in the filament. What's going on here is that these are fast LEDs.

On the flip side, mains-voltage LEDs generally have built-in power supplies which should lead to them actually showing less dimming during brief voltage dips.

Some mains-voltage LEDs in fact flicker at twice the mains frequency! This is visible when you turn your vision, or when something moving, like rotating fan blades, is illuminated.

The Phillips flood lights in the track lighting fixture in my kitchen are like this.

They contain some sort of very light-weight power supply to rectify the line voltage and adapt it to the LED, but there is no LC capacity in it to even smooth out the 120 Hz ripple.

There is no room in those bulbs for the electrolytics/inductors that would be required.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#285

Post by helpPeople »

nicoburns wrote: post #271
posedge wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what makes lighting such a hard business? I have given the issue some thought as well. f.lux integration with Hue is great, but unfortunately not a solution for me, as I'd have to keep my windows pc running all day.

The fact that bulbs are 1. small and 2. run on mains electricity is a big complicating factor. By far the easiest way to build this would be with dual-colour LED strips. But that's not how most people want to light their homes.

Electrical engineer here.

What is hard about these?

For a few dollars I can convert 120v to whatever I want.

Sell a different version to Europe

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#286

Post by Symbiote »

taurath wrote: post #19
keyle wrote: 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.

You exaggerate. Seattle looks bright compared to half of Europe.

Compare the sunset times with London, Copenhagen, Oslo.

You had 1½ hours more daylight today than Copenhagen.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#287

Post by Itsdijital »

helpPeople wrote: post #285
nicoburns wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that bulbs are 1. small and 2. run on mains electricity is a big complicating factor. By far the easiest way to build this would be with dual-colour LED strips. But that's not how most people want to light their homes.

Electrical engineer here. What is hard about these? For a few dollars I can convert 120v to whatever I want. Sell a different version to Europe

I think it's the cost. You can make a cheap driver off 120V that looks like shit and has terrible thermals.

A solid driver with good filtering and good thermal characteristics is expensive. So you're left with a $15 LED bulb that sits on a shelf next to $5 bulbs, selling to customers who see nothing other than two LED bulbs where one is grossly overpriced for no reason they can comprehend

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#288

Post by ehsanu1 »

parkerhoyes wrote: post #198
_carl_jung wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean to be on a "24h 50m" sleep cycle? Does your sleep time progressively become later until you're nocturnal, then continue looping round until it returns to a "normal" night's sleep?

Exactly. 24h 50m is the average I calculated after tracking my sleep for over a year. On average, the time that I wake up and go to sleep gets later by 50 minutes each day relative to a 24 hour day . I'm currently waking up around 2am local time. In two weeks, I'll be waking up around noon. If I lived on Mars, where the day length is 24h 37m, I would feel right at home (aside from the lack of breathable air).

Could you please briefly explain the way you cam calculate your cycle based on average time sleeping? I have to get up using alarms at times that are not related to how my body is feeling about waking up, so I don't see how tracking that would help.

I tend to start sleep later and later until I reach some dynamic equilibrium between sleep deprivation due to fixed wake up times and the tendency to delay sleep onset.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#289

Post by wheels »

ta0987 wrote: post #77
wheels wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, that's sounds interesting and is at least an avenue to chase down. Sadly, next to my stockpile of halogen bulbs, I also basically have a lifetime supply of LEDs and CFLs that didn't pass muster. Maybe someday I'll have a really big garage that needs lighting. ;-) The specific bulbs you linked to have a crazy high lumen rating, which appeals to me despite their high price. I have noticed that name brand (and pric…

There's also this company, but I haven't pulled the trigger myself because of the cost: https://www.waveformlighting.com/high-cri-led-strip-lights

Their standard socket bulb prices aren't bad (about $15 if you get a 6-pack), and they do produce bulbs for the slightly different European sockets, but shipping to Europe is about $40 (plus I'd then have to deal with picking them up at the customs office, which is always a multi-hour ordeal). But assuming I haven't found something decent before I'm next in the US in March, I'll pick some up then.

Re: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

#290

Post by helpPeople »

Itsdijital wrote: post #287
helpPeople wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electrical engineer here. What is hard about these? For a few dollars I can convert 120v to whatever I want. Sell a different version to Europe

I think it's the cost. You can make a cheap driver off 120V that looks like shit and has terrible thermals. A solid driver with good filtering and good thermal characteristics is expensive. So you're left with a $15 LED bulb that sits on a shelf next to $5 bulbs, selling to customers who see nothing other than two LED bulbs where one is grossly overpriced for no reason they can comprehend

Sell on their website? They get traffic
Post reply on HN