Recycled plastic bottles bring light to homes in Filipino slums

I use this technique on my bike at night. I have rear-facing red LED tail light on the post of my bike seat, but it is not visible from the sides. I attach a clear small-size coke bottle of water to the fender over the rear tire, with a bungee cable - in line with the LED light. The light from the red LED lights up the water bottle and makes it visible from both sides, as well as from the rear, like a big red tail light. It's cool and quite eye catching (that's the goal) when I set the light to "blink" mode.

Three weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2757047

Last week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2816556

Not much discussion. I'm sure there was at least one other with more discussion.

For those that think this is cool, checkout Garbage Warrior[1]. It's a documentary about a man building sustainable houses out of old tires, plastic & glass bottles, and the like. It's like startups meets home building!

[1]http://www.garbagewarrior.com/

This is actually a very old technique to light windowless places. The cleverness is using a bottle of water for a nearly zero cost implementation.

On sailing ships, they would install deck prisms to get light belowdecks. You can still buy replicas: http://www.scientificsonline.com/deck-prism.html (note that the flat side is on the deck, the pointy side goes down to spread out the light). A more modern implementation: http://www.boatdeckprism.com/

Any ideas what the adding of the bleach does - it is just to keep algae from growing in there, or does it have some optical properties?

This actually reuses plastic bottles, putting it one step higher up the "reduce-reuse-recycle" priority chain.

My question is how would they deal with light as soon as it gets dark?

Intuitively cool as soon as you see the video.

I'm quite tempted to do this to my shed.