Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

lincolnquirk.com

455 pointsluu286 comments

DIY 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.

[1] https://youtu.be/jLia59KfkSw

Since you seem to be a heavy user, and if you don’t mind me asking: Has your eye sight deteriorated in those eight years, and how is your sleep quality?

No problems with eyesight. No glasses or anything. I see the light as basically replacing the brightness I would be getting if I wasn’t sitting inside my office instead of outdoors.

And sleep: I don’t have any trouble sleeping, no. But as I mentioned, using a such a bright light in the evening will fuck with your day/night rhythm. If I’m not diligent to turn off those lights at sunset, I’ll easily be working up until two or three in the morning. If that happens, the problem isn’t that I wouldn’t be able to sleep (I will) or that I would sleep badly (I won’t). It’s just that it shifts my rhythm out of sync with everybody else.

Thank you!

He also created a version that simulates sunlight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw

Came here to mention both DIY Perks videos, as well as to say that the ability to change colour temp is practically vital.

Yep -- I love this video. The detail he went into on this is remarkable; it taught me a few things about the limits of pretend sunlight as a photographer, and why some pretences work and others don't.

You should also take into account the costs associated with running and powering the COB led he used for that sun light.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBV-1VNWscA

Yuji does indeed make the good stuff, just really in a consumer-friendly form factor unless you count the low-power bulbs.

For your sunset approximation, you could add some warmer ones and fade over; they also have some dual-color strips with two different color temperatures evenly spread to allow for seamless mixing.

Exactly. You’d probably need fewer of the warm colored strips, because at the time of day when you will want to use them you’ll also want less light anyway.

While true, the ability to work in a warm white atmosphere is a benefit not to be ignored.

(I'm using a 20W/m 5m strip of BC-series 1900K for my living room, along with a 10W 4000K bulb hanging from the ceiling.)

Since the OP is quite courageous about claiming someone "inventing" this in 2017, I'd like to highlight your prior art:

> Been using one of those in my office for the last eight years or so. I use a server PSU for power.

And as you mention, articles on it have been circulating for even longer.

It's Yudkowsky from LessWrong, he is actually a quite insightful thinker, but his disciples claim stuff like this all the time. LessWrong is an extreme echo chamber.

For me the breaking point was Roko's Basilisk, a self-proclaimed "most-dangerous idea of our time".

Are you honestly claiming that the author believes that Yudkowsky was literally the first person in history to suggest making lights brighter?

Also, you should read anything Yudkowsky himself has written about Roko’s basilisk. He’s never claimed that it could work, or that it’s dangerous at all.

(“Why did he ban it then?” Because he wanted to prevent it from inspiring an infohazard brainstorming session that could produce a real danger, and he apparently hadn’t heard about the Streisand effect.)

Yudkowsky claimed that the exact basilisk as described by Roko wouldn't work, but he also believes that something like it would.

Sort of. He believes that if people try to come up with infohazards and then immediately spread them, there’s a nonzero chance that they succeed. It’s unlikely, but still not something to encourage.

(This is not the same thing as “being certain that a minor modification of Roko’s basilisk would produce an evil time-travelling AI,” to be clear.)

This kind of utter gibberish is exactly why people don't take LessWrong seriously.

“Ideas can be harmful” is gibberish?

The amount of self-importance on display is what makes it sound like gibberish.

  A: "I have the most ground-breaking idea ever!"
  B: "Okay, let's hear it?"
  A: "No, it's too dangerous, it may well destroy the world, but trust
      me it's brilliant and completely novel."

It's a religion at that point.

How about bitcoin? It's not so much an idea as a piece of software, but being predicted on wasting energy it's going to do a lot of harm. That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas.

I believe that there are other ideas like that, things that set up spirals that are a lot worse than just "destroy energy to make money". Obviously they're not going to be universally compelling, an idea that's dangerous like that in one context might be perfectly safe in another. It depends on the target audience.

> That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas.

That's a good point on its own, but it's not a response. At no time did I or anyone here in this thread assert that "info hazards" do not exist. What is being discussed is whether it's worthwhile to be deferential to a person/community who is making claims of being in possession of an exceptionally catastrophic piece of information that by its nature would preclude public scrutiny on ethical grounds.

I don't think Yudkowsky is making that claim anywhere?

>At no time did I or anyone here in this thread assert that "info hazards" do not exist.

>What is being discussed is whether it's worthwhile to be deferential to a person who is making claims

It's honestly really not that clear what you're trying to discuss, certainly you haven't been making a clear statement like that. I don't think anyone is making claims of being in possession of such an infohazard for one thing, and if there were I don't think anyone would be saying you should be deferential towards someone who claimed to have one, sight unseen.

I think you're arguing with a bit of a straw man? Like no one is being all "let's be deferential towards Yudkowsky because he has the idea equivalent of a nuke". He doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, claim to have the idea equivalent of a nuke.

I assumed you were claiming that info-hazards don't exist because otherwise what exactly are you claiming?

Anyway, if that was your point, granted. Let's not be differential towards people who claim to have info-hazards, unless they can go into a room and make someone laugh themselves to death or something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBWr1KtnRcI

He doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, claim to have the idea equivalent of a nuke.

Well, he isn't willing to reveal how he convinced his opponents to let the AI out of the box.

Yeah, but his win rate is probably not that much above control.

>>It's not so much an idea as a piece of software, but being predicted on wasting energy it's going to do a lot of harm. That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas.

It's not a waste if the product the PoW generates is valued as equal to or greater than the cost of generating the PoW, and the market ensures that is the case, as miners cannot operating at a loss.

Where it can be socially harmful is when energy consumers don't pay for the cost of the negative externalities that the energy they purchase created in its generation, but that applies to all energy usage, not just that used in generating PoW.

You should know that costly signalling strategies are widely employed in nature because costly signals are reliable:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle

Money laundering is useful but that doesn't mean it's good. A Ponzi scheme can generate wealth but it can't generate value. Wealth without value is maybe not wasteful, but it is harmful.

> Where it can be socially harmful is when energy consumers don't pay for the cost of the negative externalities that the energy they purchase created in its generation, but that applies to all energy usage, not just that used in generating PoW.

Bitcoin alone uses as much power as a medium-sized nation. The increased power usage has caused old fossil-fuel power plants to come back online.

1. There is no evidence that cryptocurrency is widely used to launder money

2. Money laundering can improve economic efficiency when the crimes that generate the illicit revenue are socially beneficial, as is the case when people in China escape the Communist government's capital controls, or when people in Venezuela escape their Communist government's steep inflation tax via mandates to use the state's fiat currency.

Even in ostensibly free societies, socially harmful laws that repress the right to voluntarily interact, like price controls on N95 masks that prolonged a shortage in them for months, or heavy taxation to pay the pensions of a bloated and over-paid public sector kleptocracy, can be socially beneficial to undermine.

So your deduction that money laundering or other forms of escape from institutional rules, is socially harmful, is overly simplistic. In some cases it is harmful, and in some cases it's beneficial.

3. Cryptocurrencies are by definition not ponzi schemes. You could argue they're speculative bubbles, but that is itself speculation.

>>Bitcoin alone uses as much power as a medium-sized nation.

Because it generates billions of dollars of currency a year, and its production is costly in energy and affordable in labor. The energy consumption of labor-intensive industries obfuscates the real energy requirements of those industries, by effectively outsourcing the energy consumption to the workers.

It generates zero dollars. Every dollar in all cryptocurrency markets comes directly from someone buying in. Claiming otherwise is basically a blatant lie.

It's not generating dollars. It's generating a digital asset that is worth something. Of course the value of any commodity is based on what people are willing to buy it for, so your observation in no way discredits the point, that Bitcoin mining is generating something that objectively, based on what the market is paying, has value.

Can you link me to when anyone on LessWrong has behaved like your "A"?

Now you've just generalised the statement until it becomes a truism. So you are now essentially claiming the statement is garbage because it is devoid of useful meaning.

From the article:

>Elevator pitch: Bring enough light to simulate daylight into your home and office.

>This idea has been shared in Less Wrong circles for a couple years. Yudkowsky wrote Inadequate Equilibria in 2017 where he and his wife invented the idea

Yes, I read the same article. Do you believe, based on a single word, that the author believes that literally zero people in the entire course of human history have ever suggested “brighter lights” until Yudkowsky came along?

I don't know who any of these people are, but that is exactly what the article says, so why should we not believe that that's what the author believes?

Because it’s far more likely that the author chose slightly wrong words that ended up conflating a specific invention with being the first human “to invent the idea” that “hey, brighter lights would be closer to obviously brighter daylight” only 5 years ago. I’d wager that the author realizes that more than half of adults today had that insight sometime prior to 2017.

Some people read websites the way they would read a math proof. One tiny error and the whole thing comes down. A more charitable reading is often perfectly appropriate.

If you are reading it as a math proof, I am only disputing the claim when the idea was invented.

As I don't bring up the rest of the article's points, I am neither supporting nor refuting them with that particular comment.

Math (or actually, logic) is a bit more resilient than you make it out to be.

The LessWrong community is known for self-citations all over the place and heavy use of jargon created by themselves, and words redefined as terms-of-art. In light of this, if a member claims that one of their prominent figures "invented" something, you better take the claim at face value.

On the flip side, interpreting everything you read through your own lenses of experience and bias instead of assuming that the author meant what they wrote seems fraught with pitfalls.

Use of the word "invention" is usually a red flag. I've certainly done a number of things I never had knowledge of any prior art on, but I never said I "invented" those things.

If I wanted to, I'd probably go and research prior art first before making use of the word.

Also, I'd say that the article author is not referring just to brighter light as the invention, but rather as the use of extremely bright light indoors for different psychological effects.

No one in the parent posts has said anything about "literally zero people".

The OP made a claim ("invented in 2017"), and this very claim is being criticized.

I found perplexing that you interpret the very same words in almost opposite ways.

I cant find it again but I read an article about how brightness goes up with technology and human spend roughly the same proportion of income on light. Kind of disproving the led efficiency is good for the environment argument. Not revolutionary, better to break that pattern.

You contradict yourself.

If humans spend same proportion of income on lumens, and you get more lumens per watt, then you will use less wattage per the same proportion of income. Ergo LEDs are more efficient.

Are you thinking about the cost of the physical lights? Because what is being discussed is the cost of energy.

Watt-hours are energy. If cost of energy is decreasing and you get more lumens per watt with LEDs then the benefits stack, they do not cancel.

If energy price is going down, then even more watts are being bought (since spending is fixed).

Not all those watts are going into lighting. If spending is fixed on lighting but total expenditure is up that means energy is being bought for things other than lighting. Kirchoff's law applied to the grid in toto.

Adds up considering the proliferation of computing devices, particularly cryptomining.

[removed by author as off-topic]

In hindsight, I should not have included the comment about Roko's Basilisk. It was really nothing more than a personal observation that had nothing to do with the topic at hand. As a result, this thread attracted a lot of people who have very strong opinions on an off-topic matter, and for that I'm sorry. It muddled an already tense discussion on whether any sane person should take the claim of inventing brightly lit homes in 2017 literally or not. For what it's worth, I would have deleted the Basilisk portion if people hadn't already responded to it.

Cool, I didn't even know comments could be deleted! I appreciate your reaction.

Yudkowsky says he and his wife did it in 2014, so it sounds as if it was actually pretty much at the same time as said prior art.

(Also, they were specifically doing it as a treatment for SAD; I don't think Yudkowsky claims novelty for anything other than the idea that SAD might be effectively treated by having very bright indoor lighting all the time rather than e.g. a lightbox that you sit next to for half an hour a day.)

The Paris hotel in Las Vegas has had this for at least 20 years. When you're inside at 3am it feels like daytime. I think the idea is to keep you awake and gambling at all times.

Light as a treatment for SAD has been looked at since 1984, all day exposure is hardly a new idea.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...

Right, but for some reason the SAD light boxes you could get produced much less light, so they weren't effective for her.

In 1984, to get the amount of light put out by ~250-300 watts of LEDs in 2022 would have required the incandescent light array to come perilously close to the limit of what it is safe to pull from a single outlet continuously in the US, which is 1500 watts. (You can transiently pull 1800 from a standard wall outlet, which is used by hair dryers, but you're not supposed to pull it continuously for hours at a time.) It also would have functioned as a full-on space heater (that was on continuously, not on a thermostat as needed), and very careful attention would need to be paid to cooling this massive array.

So, I'm gonna read between some lines here, but: I imagine earlier efforts would then by necessity have produced less light, because it's actually a lot easier to deal with ~400-500 watts of incandescent light than 1500 watts of incandescent light. 400-500 I think you could just about get away with putting a diffusion screen in front of them and making sure the enclosure has a lot of passive air flow. At 1500, if you're going to enclose this into a reasonably-sized product you're going to need active cooling with fans.

And there is a little noticed and rarely talked about weakness I've seen in several science fields where I've dug into a history of papers, which is that once one investigator picks the parameters of an investigation, it tends to "stick". If the first scientist investigating "Light therapy for SAD" and picked a 500 watt incandescent setup, it is extremely likely that many further papers will try to match their lumens setup, in the interests of trying to keep the papers informing each other. The entire therapy may live and die on the contingent conditions the first couple of researchers happened to pick, even after the entire lighting landscape has changed and it's practical to blast 5 times the light per watt and have time-varying light temperature now, which would have been even more difficult in 1984. (Conceivable, with some sort of rotating filter screen in front of it, but now you're cutting in to your light output even more, unlike modern LEDs which give you more options in dealing with this.)

By the 01980s you could have easily been using fluorescents, which went mainstream a quarter century earlier, so I think your stickiness hypothesis is the more likely problem. This had been puzzling me! Thank you for providing the likely solution!

Maybe fluorescents with the idea that the narrow spectrum of light produced was less likely to be effective?

Well, I mean, SAD lightboxes do use fluorescents.

I spoke to a physiatrist who considered full spectrum light to be essential in the light boxes. Don’t know about the actual research on the topic.

The entire market of SAD lights was fluorescents pre-LEDs, they can be made just as "full spectrum" as LEDs are (by which I mean neither is capable of true full spectrum, just an approximation with appropriate phosphors).

Incandescents can actually produce a continuous spectrum, so I am guess this is and was just misuse of the term.

Yeah, I assumed you were saying that the physiatrist was insisting on the use of incandescents for that reason. I don't know why someone would interpret you as saying that LEDs were superior to fluorescents, since obviously neither one produces full-spectrum light!

I was going to suggest diy perks but thought you were going to link his artificial sun video [1]. I’ve been wanting to build one but not sure where I could fit since it requires a bit more space then a bright led build would. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw

Jesus Christ. I hadn't actually seen this one. Wow!

You could say he's going overboard in this one, with that fish tank sky simulator thing. But then: How much do we spend on airfare and lodging just to wake up to this kind of light? What an amazing improvement in quality of life this can be.

Thanks for sharing this one!

I really think it could boost a persons mood on a dark day his looks so incredible I would love to try it and even just brighten up one room. But I think if a guy were to make these as fake skylights you would really have a business.

One doesn't need to make lights out of led strips, shop lights have transitioned to LED.

$20 each, https://www.harborfreight.com/5000-lumen-4-ft-led-hanging-sh... 5k lumens, 60w

I also came to post the DIY perks video about simulated sunlight, the effect of parallel rays really changes the geometric mood of the room.

It really does help.

Just don't keep working into the night under them, because whoa boy - talk about sleep disruption. Those nice bright lights make it surprisingly easy to work until 6am and not even realize it.

I have mine hooked up to a remote so I can turn them all off at once. Either propped in the corners of the room or bounced off the ceiling. They are much too bright to have them shining directly.

When I lived in Seattle, my solution was a 2’ square fluorescent panel I got from a gardening supply place called “The Indoor Sun Shop”. I grew up in the South and got real bad seasonal depression up there; it probably saved my life. I paid all of $300 for it. Plus like twenty bucks for a mechanical timer, because I discovered that there were a lot of mornings where I was too depressed and mopey to turn it on myself. I kept it in the home office I worked in and it did a lot to shut up that little voice that suggested killing myself as the solution to every problem.

I wonder how much the traditional British pessimism has to do with the fact our winters are an SAD magnet if there ever was one, very short days due to the high latitude and the kind of grey soul-penetrating dampness of it being just cold enough to make you miserable but not cold enough for the ground to ever properly freeze for long. I definitely found taking vitamin D supplements helps with the seasonal blues, I'd try a daylight simulating lamp but I have quite severe photophobia issues.

Would you tell us a little about your photophobia, I've never heard of anyone having that before. Thank you.

I’m not the parent commenter, but I’ve heard ‘photophobia’ used to refer to the sort of extreme light sensitivity experienced by migraine sufferers: not a ‘fear of light’ per se, but rather the perception of bright light as an unpleasant or even painful stimulus.

I have a neurological disorder called visual snow syndrome that's the root cause, nobody really understands where it comes from but the current theory is a dysfunction of metabolism in part of the visual cortex. It causes all sorts of weird visual stuff like the eponymous 'tv snow' and other distortions as well as intractable headaches, apparently it has similarities with certain kinds of migraine. As for the photophobia it's quite a difficult sensation to describe but for me its acute form is an unusual sensation that's in the same category as pain without being pain itself - it's like the sensation of looking directly at the sun but with ordinary light sources that don't bother other people. The chronic form is less intense, it basically just makes concentrating in a bright environment exhausting after a while and it trashes my focus, making me headachy and irritable. As a result I never have strong lights on even at night, and I also don't drive in the dark because the glare from the headlights can mess up my vision for minutes at a time which is obviously not safe.

Fluorescent tubes are among the worst offenders for messing with my concentration, though anything with a pronounced 50 Hz flicker or too high a colour temperature isn't great for me. The kind of cheap lights offices traditionally use are particularly bad which is part of why I'm full time WFH now!

Thanks for explaining.

there was a post a day or two ago about vitamin D3, as well as academic literature finally catching up to medical science vis a vis vitamin D3.

I won't cite, but only because i don't have a way to index my personal PDF repository, but the common consensus among people who study such things is that anyone living above the 20th parallel (or below, technically) absolutely must supplement vitamin D3, as even a full day in the sun naked is not enough to synthesize the amount of D3 we need.

So with that in mind, I'd honestly expect more people to know this and be supplementing D3. I don't have any specific recommendations, but i do know some guidelines and recent discoveries into "max dosing", so here they are. Anecdotally, i take 5000-6000iu every two days. I have a weird sleeping schedule so i really only notice "a day" as the sort of fog and fatigue i get after having gone more than 30 hours without D3. Prior to about 2015 or so, the max dosage was in the sub-5000iu range, with most supplement's labels stating that 500-1000iu was the "RDA" for D3.

However since covid was exponentially responsible for research into literally anything that could help alleviate symptoms/the disease and accelerate the time to recovery, some doctors were giving extremely high iu, up to 250,000iu over the course of a few days, or single doses of 50,000-80,000iu, with no deleterious effects reported.

Personally, unless i actually get sick, i try to stay under 8000-10000iu, at least until someone does a longitudinal study about the long term effects of doses higher than that.

As to the article and your point about lights helping - i've never noticed anything about any sort of light. I can feel awful at noon on a clear day while outside, or awful inside under every light type imaginable. I'm glad that light (and types of lights) help some people. I just think that the root cause is D3 deficiency, and no amount of 20k lumen arrays is really going to help.

As a quick aside, if you want to supplement children with D3 i recommend finding chewable d3 or a childrens multi-vitamin with omega-3/6 fatty acids. A couple of studies (with decent N and correlations) showed that merely supplementing omegas in children's diets improved the relationship and overall wellbeing of the children's parents - you read me right, parents didn't have to supplement to get the benefits of the children supplementing.

All I've heard is the danger of calcium precipitating out of your blood and causing arterial blockages. Apparently D3 potentiates this so that the concentration of blood-borne calcium doesn't need to be as high for this to begin.

I've always been wary of going up to max-dose levels for that reason.

with the way research is going i'd expect to find it's something else in conjunction with D3 that causes that, and not merely D3. like D3 and a high sodium diet, or D3 and <some local thing>.

as mentioned though, i only think that 500-1000iu is not enough for most people. I'm not a doctor though, but it is one avenue of alleviating SAD as well as lethargy and stuff that most people vape/smoke/caffeinate to deal with.

You should take D3 with vitamin K2 (talk with your doctor first if you're on blood-thinning medications) to avoid calcium being dumped into soft tissues (K2 ensures it preferentially goes into bones).

It's a good idea to get your vitamin D status tested yearly and aim to be at least 50 ng/ml (120 nmol/l), but not more than 80 ng/ml (200 nmol/l).

As an example for dosages: I take about 7000 IU of vitamin D3 and 180 mcg of vitamin K2 daily. My levels test at about 180 nmol/l and my blood calcium is normal.

How did you determine that ratio of D3 to K2?

If you are going to supplement D3 over 5000iu, I would recommend getting a 25(OH)D blood test once or twice a year, ideally 2-3 months after each change in dose. Then compare your levels to the levels here and adjust dosage accordingly: https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/vitamind-healthprofessiona...

It may also be worth adjusting dosage between winter and summer months, depending on the amount of outdoor activity you do.

Surely you don't mean the 20th parallel, right? That would include most of the population of the world wouldn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_parallel_north

yes, 20th does include most of the world population. Humans started out within 20 degrees of the equator for the vast majority of human history, and eventually fanned out, but it takes longer than a couple thousand years to make up for the loss in D3 synthesis.

edit: it could be 25th or 30th, i have a hard time finding a single paper amongst thousands, either way it includes 90% of the population of the US, regardless of what parallel.

I was taking a lot of vitamin D in Seattle! That took some of the edge off the depression but I still started wanting to kill myself all the time after a couple months of endless grey skies and drizzle, and it came earlier every winter.

The lamp helped for a while but the suicidal urges kept creeping back over the years, until I finally moved back south. The urge to kill myself has pretty much entirely vanished now.

There is, I suspect, no one single cure for seasonal depression. Lights help, massive D3 doses help, vacations in sunnier places help, and there’s probably a ton of other biological factors helped by me living in the sunny place I grew up in versus Seattle.

I'm from India. Lighting in my middle class house, since forever, has been poor. I never consciously felt it when I was still studying. Just that the rooms were dark and I would prefer to play/study outside, or in the front room, where the door was always open, allowing a lot of sunlight.

I realized the lighting factor a few years back. Now, My own home has two lights in every room and whenever I am studying/reading/cooking, I always have them both on.

The difference is stark. Perhaps I am clutching my pearls when I say this, but I feel my quality of life has improved with better lighting.

I also got my walls painted with very light colors, and the ambient light is just amazing.

Good lighting is a blessing.

> The difference is stark.

For led lighting, 20W (ceiling fittings) for every 100 sf in rooms with light walls provides a lot of illumination in my experience. Can double that for kitchens etc.

An interesting question regarding lighting's effect on studying + retaining material + focus ;

Does the entire space need to be well lit - or the object of your focus (which can require the entire scene (such as a lab etc) - but when it comes to reading and computing. If you have a spot on your book or your computer that was of the sun-like quality, (obviously without glare on screens), would that suffice to aid in focus and retention.

I assume that a well lite complete space serves a more biological soothing and depression help.

So it would be interesting to know if there are differing applications of sun-like light based on the goals.

At late actual night, a sun-like spotlight on your focus might be good. When you're up and active, then light the whole space...

This has been applied for decades. Those 'ceiling windows' in art galleries are often false windows with bright daylight lamps beneath it.

By the way, the sun produces ~50.000 lux on earth's surface. That's 100 times more than in a wall illuminated office. To reach that brightness, you would need tens of kilowatts of LED lightning for medium and larger sized rooms. That's totally infeasible. Also, imagine the heat building up. It will literally be like a greenhouse in your room. So in reality, no one actually aims for the brightness of the sun. But just something fairly bright at a high ('cool') color temperature. That produces the same sensation.

Not only that, but it would also be impossible to see what’s on your computer screen as this isn’t designed to outshine the sun.

if such a thing were possible, would it be healthy to use a monitor with a 10K lux backlight? I can't decide if this would help or just fry your eyes.

Well the sun makes 50klux of light on the surface, and we look at that amount all the time with no harm.

Yes, but usually we don't look into that.

You don't look at the surface of the earth?

He's of the concave theorists, which take the flat Earth society one step further, and believe the Earth is concave.

And surely for them, you can see the horror of such large amounts of light being funneled, being reflected back and forth, over and over. So no, most assuredly, he does not look at the Earth!

Perhaps in theory, considering that when you look at someone's face outside on a sunny day, it is brighter than that. OTOH, staring directly into a lightbulb isn't pleasant, so I suppose there's more to this.

Either way, I think the best way to deal with bright light isn't a brighter screen. It's an unlit screen, like e-ink or something.

>would it be healthy to use a monitor with a 10K lux backlight?

The eyes adapt to brighter backlights but you end up not being able to see your desk.

One major annoyance is that eye floaters become a lot more prominent the smaller your pupils are.

does that also include infra red/non visible parts of the spectrum? sorry I'm not familiar with the unit involved

No, lux is based on lumen and itself founded on the human perception of light using the luminous efficiency function.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficiency_function

Many people (including myself) find such brightness levels uncomfortable, and wear sunglasses.

Sunlight is free, but electric light is not. This is why light in my apartment is very bright but not nearly as bright as the streets on a sunny summer day.

It doesn't need to be the whole room. Just a small patch would feel like having a skylight with the sun pouring in.

'Overcast February day in London' is only 5,000 lux at the surface, according to my lux meter.

You could achieve that with 750W of LEDs. Of course, that is still quite a lot of power.

Depends on distance. They make e27 screw in LED bulbs that will put out over 5,000 lux but you would need to hold the bulb pretty close to your face to get the full value of it.

I live in Sweden (country with severe darkness) and just bought two Virtual Sun united from https://innerscene.com/

NOTE: Be extremely careful when transporting/moving these units, they easily break. The supplier who imported them on my behalf got two shipments with broken units until they finally got one that wasn't damaged. This happened despite FRAGILE markings on the packaging.

Innerscene's Virtual Sun is much smaller and lighter than the classic Coelux.

    Coelux:
    Weight: 300 kg (660 lb)
    Dimensions: 2375 x 1675 x 691 mm (93.5 x 65.9 x 27.2")

    Innerscene Virtual Sun:
    Weight: 39 kg (85.8 lbs)
    Dimensions: 1001 x 514 x 255 mm (39 7/16 x 20 1/4 x 10")

What's the pricing for these? Looks interesting.

Back in 2021-10-06 when I bought mines, they were crazy expensive!

I paid 89239 SEK (~9349 USD) +25% VAT = 111549 SEK (~11685 USD) per unit.

Not sure about the VAT rate if buying from US.

Hopefully they have reduced the prices since then, not sure.

how long do these last? you seem to have made a huge capital investment here

Not sure, haven't even tried them yet, still renovating the house, three years and counting. But according to the specs:

    L70 ≥50,000 hours at 25°C ambient

L70 is "An LED is considered to have reached its rated life at that point in time when it emits 30% less light than it initially did. This 70% brightness level is termed “L70” and may also be referred to as Lumen Maintenance." (https://nunvdata.unvlt.com/uploads/Understanding_L70_and_Why...)

Did you take any pictures of the inner workings of the broken ones by chance? I'm curious if there are any hints about how they work, or the Coelux ones.

What does that amount of product loss due to the OEMs bottom line, let alone the extreme waste directly into the environment.

> Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company

Such a thing already exists. Its called a lighting design company.

People need to admit that lighting (like cryptography) is hard, and that if you're serious about "doing it right" you need to bring in a suitably skilled professional.

Each house/apartment is different and every room within it is different, you'll never be able to magically buy good lighting out of the box to be installed on a plug and play basis.

So if you are already undergoing the expense of a full-refurb and are serious about getting the lighting right, then really you should throw a few coins in the direction of a lighting professional.

People already spend thousands of dollars on skylights without any professional lighting design, yet they pay a professional draughtsman to design it specially for their house, council to approve it, and licensed tradesman to build it. I don't get why they don't spend those same thousands on what you suggest or an off-the-shelf product that an electrician (or DIY) can install.

I thought the same. For me the article is missing an explanation of why existing artificial skylights cost $30k, and how to avoid those costs.

> For me the article is missing an explanation of why existing artificial skylights cost $30k, and how to avoid those costs.

Because people with rare diseases are willing to pay a lot of money for stuff sold by snake-oil peddlers after they have been let down by the traditional healthcare system, and other than people with SAD there's not much of a market for these things.

Having been a study of people for a long time? This impacts everyone, just some to bigger degrees. There is a reason Seattle is such a huge coffee (and antidepressant) consumer, and it isn't because these impacts are rare.

They're just ignored because no one has figured out how to solve it (or that it is a problem for them).

There are loads of products on the market that are intended to deliver short bursts of light to you. Usually they are marketed under the name "bright light" or "daylight" lamp. The point with light is that the intensity drops quadratic with distance. So, most of these solutions are intended to be used close to your face. The further away they are from you, the more energy you need. So, a wall or ceiling mounted solution is more costly.

I used to live in Finland where the winters are dark and long and lots of my colleagues had these in their offices. The first time I saw one (a Philipps bright light), I thought it was some kind of fancy new Apple device I did not know yet. Until they turned it on. Highly effective apparently in countering winter depression, which is a common thing that far North.

Basically you use them for 30 minutes or so in the morning. You actually need to be careful with this as you can damage your eyes. I checked on Amazon and you can get loads of different products in this category for under 50 euro or pay a premium for something bigger/fancier. E.g. Beurer has an ipad sized 10K lux solution: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/daylight-simulation-intensity-dis.... I can't vouch for any of these products since I don't need or use them though.

Personally, I prefer to just take a walk when my calendar permits. It's good for multiple reasons and also re-energizes me while lowering stress. Just a 45 minute stroll does wonders; I do longer walks when time permits as well. I live in Germany these days so, it's less dark in the winter here and it did not really affect me that much even when I was living in Finland. I noticed my colleagues from further south were suffering a lot more; or at least moaning more about it.

Can confirm. Have worked on so many extremely large scale construction projects, on the tech side, and I see all the lighting plans during the design process...

And I am always dumbfounded when I see the actual results. Even back when software available today, Blender, Sketchup and other design software did not exist ; lighting designers were REALLY good at coming up with nice lighting designs...

Now with the advent of these tools, lighting design today is lightyears from where it was a decade ago - but its still HARD to do well.

I went this route on a home renovation and it was worth every penny. I’m overly picky about lighting in general. Temperature, direction, intensity, and especially shadows. I was recently at a friends house that did a remodel and while plating my food in their kitchen my own shadow was cast on my plate and the food in front of me on their countertop. I felt so odd like a mild inconvenience I forgot existed. I told him jokingly he needs a refund from his contractor.

I am an EE but at University part of the degree was sufficient units to be eligible for membership of the national illumination engineers society.

One point that stood out is that effective and safe lighting is as much, or more, about contrast than any absolute spot lighting levels.

There 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.

Dont forget you also cannot read you monitor/laptop anymore.

Good example of such lighting would be Kessil: https://kessil.com/aquarium/freshwater_A360.php

As you can see, heat management is a prime feature of these lights, and the quality in general is absolutely amazing (it’s priced accordingly, though).

I tried doing something like this last year, I purchased lots of 1000 lumen LED bulbs.

The light was blindingly bright to look at and it looks very strange in a room.

My takeaway was:

* that you need some type of diffuser.

* The light leak out of the apartment was crazy. My apartment looked completely insane from the street.

* The light warmth is very important. And proper sun coloured lamps don't exist or are crazy expensive.

I used "rails lights" (the kind they often use in boutiques) and pointed them up at the ceiling (rails are mounted on walls, not the ceiling). There is almost nowhere in the apartment where you can look directly at a light source. The result: bright but pleasantly diffused light.

Very cool. I had considered something like this: install "crown moulding" a few inches shy of the ceiling and running rope lighting along where it will not be seen — but can scatter across the ceiling.

This is a super common design technique - you can buy LED ready moulding:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=crown+moulding+led&ia=web

My brother has that in his apartment and it's not very bright. It's fine in a bedroom if you just want to relax, but not as a main light source.

"Warmth" and "naturalness" are produced by high CRI index (90+).

I have 8 lamps with CRI 90+ in my living room, at 5000K color temperature, 1500 lumens each. They produce nice light that seamlessly mixes with daytime sunlight from the window: they seem to have the same color.

I also have a few LED strip installation over desks and tables, very bright at max dimmer setting. A diffuser is a must, even though it lowers the brightness noticeably. Without it, anything moderately shiny will reflect painfully bright dots of light.

Quick guide to CRI

<90: Crap

90-95: Can be ok, or not. Depends. Different lights will likely not mix at the same color temperature.

98: Good

99-100 full spectrum cyberlight: As good as Halogen and only ~30x as expensive.

R9 is also important in the higher CRI ranges. CRI is based on pastels - it's an artifact of measuring traditional florescent bob performance - and R9 captures the vivid reds that are important to truly accurate color rendition.

Just from the scale I think it's clear that CRI is not that good a measure. As you say, CRI uses rendition of a dozen or so colors as a measure. The scale is heavily compressed - orange sodium vapor streetlights which are almost monochromatic "achieve" a CRI of 30, which is nowhere near "colors are 30 % good". Similarly, mercury vapor lamps have a CRI of around 50, and yet are complete garbage. All cheap LED fixtures are CRI 80 or 85 which is also garbage. 95 and 98 sounds very close, but aren't.

SSI - spectrum similarity index - is probably a better measure, because it doesn't look at a few colors, but at the entire spectrum, and so heavily punishes peaky and discontinuous spectra as produced by many LEDs. High SSI values also result in much better mix-and-match behavior of light sources. Even CRI 95 LEDs often don't mix well, usually on the pink-barf-scale (tint).

How can one find, or measure, the SSI of a given light bulb?

Funny quip I heard a few days ago from a guy designing LED systems for parking garages: "in a public lot your CRI only needs to be good enough to see the difference between blood and motor oil"

Can you share a link / the name of the product?

I'm a big fan of Seoul Semiconductor's SunLike LEDs.

http://www.seoulsemicon.com/en/technology/sunlike/casestudy/

Thanks! Looks like they make the GE Sunfilled bulb, which is available for $2.57/bulb right now at Lowe's: https://www.lowes.com/pd/GE-GE-SUNFILLED-60W-A21-5000K-1CT/1...

They claim to have a CRI of 97. They're dimmable and claim to be circadian-rhythm-friendly by not having a "blue spike", but don't claim to dim to a warmer tone.

Bought 21 of them for use with the 7-bulb splitter that Ben Kuhn now recommends, linked elsewhere in this thread: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01FKIE6M4/ref=as_li_ss_tl...

You should try with a short arc xenon bulb like the Osram XBO series. They are among other things used architecturally for emulating daylight inside buildings.

Downside is you need a 70A 28V power supply and a semi-massive cooling system. And bulb lifetime is approx. 1 year of normal use.

I found that:

1) Most modern LEDs are surprisingly good for being sun-colored. It's luck-of-the-draw, though. I once bought some very expensive CFL bulbs from B&H, rated as 90+CRI, and they were literally tritone. I bought some bottom-of-the-barrel LED bulbs at Walmart, and they were great (until they started failing a few months later).

2) You can test this yourself with a $1 pair of diffraction glasses. They're sold as "3d" or "rainbow" or similar kids toys at dollar stores, or with a shipping markup Fleabay.

3) Diffuser is important, but it's also possible to just install many bulbs all around.

4) Consistency is important. If your hallway feels dimmer or brighter than your room, it's not great.

5) Changing color temperature is nice.

I don't think there's a business model here, though. This stuff isn't expensive, but most of the cost is educating the customer. Once a customer is educated, they can do the same thing themselves without your help (even with cheap Walmart lights).

> You can test this yourself with a $1 pair of diffraction glasses.

I'm reading between the lines here: I think you want to see as continuous a spectrum as is possible with LEDs, not three discrete bands (R, G, B)?

I know LED are not spectrally continuous like incandescent (black body) radiation. Maybe the phosphor coating excites in a more continuous spectrum?

> I don't think there's a business model here, though.

I disagree. I would pay a premium if a company could offer a line that hit the mark on all points: temperature, brightness, spectrum, non-flickering.

My alternatives today appear to be a kind of roulette. And a lot of money is wasted at roulette....

Correct. You can see a continuous spectrum on some bulbs, and bulbs split into three (R, G, and B) for others. It's very obvious. You can't tell a CRI of 80 from 85, but in my experience, it doesn't matter very much.

You're correct that the alternatives now are a kind of roulette. A new company would add one more bullet (or empty chamber) into the barrel. There is no way for a customer to know "Company X solves this problem correctly." If you run LightBulbX and do everything right, and I run LumiNosiTechNo and have the same marketing pages as you, people won't know better.

If reputation builds up somehow, LightBulbX is just as liable to get bought up by an investor who milks that reputation by selling $2 products for $1000.

A value proposition isn't the same as a viable business model. I think there's a clear value proposition which many people would in abstract pay for in an abstract world of perfect transparency and information, but we're not in that world. I don't think there's a viable business model.

The market is flooded with fakes and shittily QA'd products (often under previously good brand names) - having a turnkey solution with guaranteed quality would have a lot of buyers, and there is a lot of potential to grow a new solid brand.

If you do, please don't sell to private equity right away. Let us all get a couple years of a real solid product at least.

I'm still pissed at the (well known brand) USB stick I bought (marked high speed!) due to shitty engineering would overheat on any transfer longer than about 10 seconds, then throttle to KB/s read/write speed. Average speed was 1.5MB/s.

So... there was a time when I was on the path to recovery to depression, had a bit of a hiccup when I found myself in a very tiny room that served as storage space in my (dear, helpful) uncle's apartment.

So besides pushing all the stuff he had stashed away and doing some feats of organization there, I put some extremely bright led lamp pointing from the window to the rest of the room, flooding it with white light that made it as bright as day. It was really cheap off my local Home Depot-equivalent.

It really fixed my mood, fewer intrusive thoughts, less of a depressive state, more tranquility, if I had rougher times, psychotic episodes for instance, it would also calm them.

Years later I'm much better, and though things aren't easy, they only get better as I put grow lights and plants in what otherwise would be a dark apartment (I get the white ones that advertise a broad spectrum light but doesn't go into ultraviolet on a local hardware store, rather than the purple ones that everyone is putting on their apartments on NY). I reclaim the space room by room with brightness and plants.

https://www.day-lite.com/ already exists, for a lot cheaper than the author's estimates (no one is paying $1000+ for some bright bulbs).

Here's some more:

https://www.superbrightleds.com/moreinfo/decorative-ceiling-....

https://www.amazon.com/Artika-Residential-Ultra-Thin-Dimmabl...

> no one is paying $1000+ for some bright bulbs

That $30k Coelux thing they mention is quite a bit more than “some bright bulbs”. Their lighting casts sharp shadows. If you look into it, you see a bright sky with an image of the sun (https://www.cepro.com/news/coelux_the_40000_fake_skylight_ev...)

I think rich people will easily pay that for such a thing.

One of the products that day-lite.com sells "was $949" so it's almost true. :)

Those sub $1000 options from daylite don't look very bright, despite the reviews they have very few images that show what they look like in a room and the ones they do have look like a regular LED panel stuck on the wall. I doubt this comes anywhere close to simulating real daylight. It looks like they're just supposed to be a fake window that gives off a little light. Maybe their fake skylights are better, I can't find anything other than a single image. Not even an option to buy one.

While Elizer certainly didn't invent the thing, just read the references he cites. He was right that its a pain in the ass to build and that pretty much all solutions available are no where near bright enough despite claiming otherwise. Expense and heat, which is really just more expense, aren't the only issues though. Assuming the premise that its good for health, another issue is that we do not know if the health effects require us to match the spectrum. Notably the reliable research on the topic I have read have always used number of hours outdoors in sunlight, not some contraption. He thinks it worked for his wife, but someone depressed is very likely to support their loved ones delusions that their personal effortful attempt to help worked, and if that loved one is persistent and persuasive, often delude themselves into thinking that. Either way, it would be a single sample. Research is very much needed, and building such a rig is a fun project and a great way to learn exactly how much effect your house control systems really allow.

If I just like the daylight-bright lights, I don’t need a research paper to tell me that. I would buy many of these for several hundred £ if I lived in cloudy London again.

I saw an attempt at a similar thing posted on Hacker News in the past. Rather than use many standard lightbulbs, he used one massive 30,000 lumen "corn cob" bulb: https://www.benkuhn.net/lux

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21660718

However, there is now an update on the blog where he seems to have independently switched to the "lumenator" system as described in the links on today's post:

> Update 2020-11-16: For my home, I ended up switching from the corncob bulb to three 7-way splitters and 21 100W equivalent 5000K Cree bulbs from Home Depot.

Both Ben and Lincoln work at Wave (as do I), so I suspect they may well have been comparing notes.

https://www.wave.com

Having grown up in Korea and lived in America, Canada, and the UK, one thing I consistently noticed about all those Western homes is how dark they are.

Most homes where I come from have a large, flat lamp in the center of the ceiling of each room that evenly illuminates the entire room. Large spaces may have more than one such lamp. In the past, this was accomplished with a bunch of fluorescent tubes arranged to look like a single large lamp. These days, it's all LED. People also put lamps on the bedside table, above the dining table, and other places they want to accentuate, but it's always in addition to, not instead of, the large ceiling lamp.

Most of the American/Western homes I've been to don't have a single bright light in the living room or any bedroom, relying more often on several low-temperature lamps scattered around the space. It looks really nice, it's perfect for watching movies, and it may have been more energy-efficient in the past. But it's just so damn dark, especially if the room doesn't face the sun.

Yeah Americans seem to associate 'bright white light' with commercial or institutional spaces and dimmer yellow light with 'home' but it's not a universal view, the aesthetic is cultural

Simulating Daylight isn't very easy, especially not with LED diods. https://vgl.ict.usc.edu/Research/OptimalLED/ There was a lot of research in covering the daylight spectra by adding additional LED diods to get close to daylight. Coming from a filmset background, usually strong metal Halide lights are used only to simulate a daylight scene, for example the arri daylight 18, which is using a Metal Halide 18000 Watt bulb.Attached outside of windows. Furthermore light sources (except for lasers) drop intensity quadratically, meaning the size of your room is a big factor. Talking about LED's, even on shoot's like the "mandalorian" where the main light source is a LED-WALL, the light isn't enough so that additional Studio lighting is added.

Wow, I’ve never wanted a bill of materials for a conference paper before.

Have you seen anyone successfully build a RGBW+Amber array that matches their results?

You might like an ecologic option. Think of a fiber optic cable or mirror tube that can be placed from a roof to any room in the house. Could not find a good english translation, but similar to this one: https://www.lichtkamin.de/

Have you seen any options that don’t require a fat tube running through the house?

Definitely the problem to solve. I thought about splitting this up into hundreds of optical fiber filaments. These could fit in wall elements or next to other pipe elements.

Etendue will limit your success, though. Especially if you don't track the sun (or there is a cloud in the way).

The option of using fiber optics cables to redirect sunlight is discussed in this article: https://www.buildinggreen.com/blog/fiber-optics-daylighting One of the companies mentioned looks pretty interesting: https://himawarisolar.com/

It's a shame the article doesn't talk about the actual LED components; I could use some pointers.

I built my living room lighting myself using a Raspberry Pi, a PCA9685 PWM IC (on one of those convenient little boards), a couple of MOSFETs and resistors on a breadboard, wiring (obviously), and fifteen lighting armatures that each have LEDs arranged on a square of about 15 cm². The LEDs are all of the 5050 RGBWW type (red, green, blue, and warm white), where the warm white LEDs perform the bulk of normal lighting. These are all mounted on the ubiquitous 12 mm 12 V LED strips, and are glued to an aluminium backplane, in nine parallel strips of 15 cm (9 LED components each). Each armature unit is covered by an MDF frame with a diffuser plate with a high light transmission suitable for LEDs, and the frames snap on to the armature units with magnets (that works really well and looks really good).¹²

This works well for such an amateur setup, but the two main issues are attrition due to heat death (presumably), and a wish for a little more lumens output. So for the next generation of these I want to keep the same form factor, but I'm thinking of making custom (replaceable!) PCBs with RGB LEDs and separate warm whites LEDs on an aluminium-backed PCB (JLCPCB can manufacture this type); keeping the nine-parallel-strips layout, but foregoing the backplane to allow heat to dissipate in the space between ceiling drywall and the floor above.

What I'm stuck on is how to find out where to source the warm-white LED SMD components that are actually good and not just tolerable. That is, good light colour, high CRI, etc, and where to get them as a consumer. Does anyone know which communities on the Internet know this?

Still a bit of a learning curve there regarding working with SMDs and designing PCBs, but that's part of the fun.

1: Testing progress in 2017: https://twitter.com/jdhoek/status/828319063097143297

2: Finished with their diffuser covers; three of the units are visible here (note that the ceiling beading trim is still missing — long since finished of course): https://twitter.com/jdhoek/status/885499829052485632/photo/2

If you're looking to increase component life you definitely don't want to forgo the backplane; heatsinking is absolutely critical for high brightness LED longevity. There is too much heat being put out by that tiny chip for convective cooling to be of any use without spreading it out first. The problem is, unless they are specifically marketed as such, those LED strips usually do not have any thermal management, meaning that heat is not being transferred through the strip board into your backplane.

Unless you're well-versed in PCB thermal management design, I wouldn't attempt designing your own LED boards - get prefab units like those sold by https://www.ledsupply.com/ , which you can screw directly onto a heatsink. And if you really do want to design a custom board, the emitters LEDSupply packages are a good place to start--there are only a handful of manufacturers for high-quality high-brightness diodes and they pretty much stock them all. You can find Cree XLamp LEDs for example at any of the major component retailers.

The fellow from the YouTube channel DIY Perks has several projects dealing with this, including an amazing parallel-ray "sun", and other projects recycling old TV and laptop screens into fake windows.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOJU8YJjFwGN0hMRewz2_u2Ie...

It’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 season.

Power waste is not an issue even in summer. Power production is driven by demand. Turn on more lights, and electricity companies will produce more electricity, and eventually they will make it cheap. Turn off the lights, and they'll do nothing because there's no demand.

That was my pitch for nuclear power.

It's much more complex than that because power supply is not perfectly elastic. Power companies have to commit ahead of time to a certain level of production. In that sense power production is driven by projected demand.

Power waste is an issue - at times where there is oversupply, wholesale power prices can actually go negative and at that point there is an excess of power in the network which cannot be stored and if it's not consumed will lead to electrical damage. So people actually get paid to waste power. Ever seen a sports stadium with all the lights blazing late at night even though noone is there? They are one of the groups who take advantage of negative power prices. There are also places where there are literally resistors placed along the ground to sink excess electricity (as heat) into the earth during these times.

When you say "eventually they will make it cheap" that seems likely to be a misconception also. Power production is not like manufacturing. Although innovation can lead to increases in efficiency and therefore reduced cost, inefficiency is not the limiting factor on power cost.

I would reply, but since those angry warriors downvoted my very reasonable comment, I should not.

Perhaps I should stop trying to talk on hacker news at all.

SAD, as in being “very sad”?

Seasonal Affective Disorder probably.

Which also makes you very sad.

I’ve used horticultural fluorescents as indoor lighting. It was fairly pleasant.

According to what I've found, grow lights can emit enough UV rays to make them (unfortunately) a non-starter for inside your home.

Looks like for LEDs at least that is not true:

"commercially available LED light sources (for horticultural or other applications) can be considered human safe when designed, installed and used in accordance with the applicable standards, regulations and manufacturer’s instruction"

https://www.valoya.com/the-effect-of-led-grow-lights-on-huma...

This really isn't a great source to support that idea and is quite lacking in details. And it's not hard to find articles suggesting otherwise.

I've been working on this for my home office. I went with a cheap "Sputnik" ceiling lamp, and 2:1 splitters to put 20 75watt Cree bulbs on my ceiling. Bulbs have gotten more expensive it seems; it cost me ~US$200.

https://imgur.com/a/UdAk6HE

In many cases (mine included), SAD is not so much about how much light we get, but about when: I manage my sleep/wake cycle by getting a good dose of light in the morning (I do my morning E-mails with a nice strong blueish LED-lamp next to my monitor) and dimming/reddening my screens in the evening.

It is not even the level of darkness outside, but the direction of the level change: I need my lamp from October to January (or when I have a gig in Norway in the winter) but already at the start of February I feel the light coming back, even though it is as dark outside as at the end of November

So, in summary: it is more about the timing of the light than the amount (but YMMV, of course)

It's about timing and intensity. You should aim to get 100,000 lux into the eye within the first two hours of waking. Dr. Andrew Huberman has a comprehensive podcast episode on the science behind this: https://youtu.be/NAATB55oxeQ

One thing they are missing is collimation. You might want the light rays to be parallel, to simulate the far away sun and to get sharp shadows. I tried to come up with a solution to do this in a flat package, but optics is not my strong suit.

Generally, you always have a trade-off here: If you want to get rid of the harsh point-like light sources, you have to add a diffuser, and then you get indirect light. But too diffused, and you get the feeling of sitting in a studio or in a bright cave. I think having a window or a skylight with parallel, non-diffused light and letting the reflections on the walls diffuse it is probably the most natural-looking solution.

There's a comment below yours with a link to a video where a youtuber solves that problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30497038

Yeah but he uses a huge parabolic mirror, which he places in the next room. He mentions fresnel lenses, but they are expensive, have color fringes, and depending on the focal length the whole light will also not be very flat.

The holy grail would be something that has the size of a picture frame, and you can slap below the ceiling, to fake a roof window.

If you combine a good fresnel lens with some clever mechanics or a micro mirror array light source, I wonder if you could even make the angle move over the day? Using fresnel lenses, you could also split it up into multiple cells, to make cooling easier. But I guess in the end there is a reason why the commercial system costs $30.000 and takes more than a foot of thickness.

Why is collimation important?

If 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.

If you have Hue lights, make sure to upgrade to the new generation that just came out. It's much brighter. The color ones were sold out, but I found it worthwhile to upgrade even though I can't make them blue anymore.

Otherwise, Cree is one of the best home bulb brands.

Funny thing about Hue, instead of brighter, I wish they'd go dimmer. If I want more light, I can always get more bulbs. But currently the lowest brightness (at least for the standard white tones bulbs I have) is too bright to work for evening / night scenes.

I've noticed that too, but if you shift hues to be very yellow then it feels a bit darker. I've been satisfied with that.

Cree is a good choice. The 'smart' versions of their bulbs are also convenient for if you want to set it to 'daylight' 5000k during the day---it looks better (IMHO) in a room that gets some natural light during the day---and change it to a warmer temp at night.

For a year I had my home office setup with LED strip lights all the way around the room. They were mounted on a narrow shelf encircling three walls. Color temp was about 6000K.

I loved it, for a while. It felt like a fresh bright day. However, after some months of 12 hours a day of working in this environment, I started having pain in my eyes, almost as if they were being squeezed.

This discomfort persisted for a month after I left my office (took a DN work-cation in the Caribbean). As I began looking into this, I started reading about issues with blue light. I found suggestions that too much blue light was harmful. And likely me spending 12+ hours looking at bright monitor screens was also harmful.

After returning from my trip, I removed most of my lights and turned my monitor brightness way down. Since then, I haven't had the same bad feelings.

I would think that light is light, and only brightness and color temperature would be the variables. But perhaps there's something more, because in general it seems that eyes are fine with outside daylight but less fine with indoor lights. I would like to know what is best for my comfort and health, but I'm not sure anyone really knows; studies and articles often disagree...

"blue light is harmful" is a highly debated topic. Iirc there is no consensus yet and some studies indicate that it's not a health risk.

Apart from that, having a screen that is too bright can certainly cause problems. Especially if the contrast is very stark to the surrounding environment.

I personally use a light theme when it's very bright outside/inside and a dark theme when it's dark + my monitor brightness at home is set to ~70% which is plenty.

And a simple test for it would be to buy a $3 set of blue-light blocking glasses and see if that solves the problem for you rather than throwing out a bunch of far more expensive lights.

Some lamps output a better spectrum than others. While the distribution of wavelengths output by something glowing with black-body radiation (like the sun or an incandescent lamp) is very smooth and reminds of a normal distribution, CFLs are famous for having terrible light (it's mostly spikes of specific frequencies in blue, green and red, and the relative height of those can be tuned to get a desired color temperature). White LEDs are much better than that: they are actually blue LED with a phosphor coating that absorbs the light and reemits white light. The light from the phosphor has a good, smooth spectrum, but depending on LED quality a good portion of the blue light can shine through, giving it much more output in the blue wavelengths (even at low color temperatures, for the purposes of color temperature you can just shifting the rest more into the red, or by cheating and adding some red LEDs into the mix).

LEDs that minimize that issue are widely available due to demand from photographers, video makers, etc, but they cost a good bit more.

Very related to this, I've been trying to relocate a video about "making a sun in a box" where the creator does the following: - goes over power and lumens, basic wiring for a bare LED. - details how the color of light matters. - instructs how to measure the focal length of a fresnel lens for parallel light rays. - how to make an appropriately sized box that can be stacked in both directions to crate a "window" effect.

I've spent tens of hours trying to relocate this particular video; I thought it was a "DIY Perks" video but either he deleted it or it was someone very similar. It's so similar to DIY Perks' projector project and satellite dish sun project that it's uncanny, but it's neither of those videos.

If anyone knows this video and has a link I would be appreciative.

This isn't quite what you're looking for, but this has some of what you're looking for, which is how to get the "parallel light effect" that the sun has, so it doesn't look like a bulb, and diffuses properly:

https://youtu.be/6bqBsHSwPgw

Hope this helps a little.

It's not the video, but it certainly has some of what I am looking for. Thank you; it's appreciated.

> Elevator pitch: Bring enough light to simulate daylight into your home and office. This idea has been shared in Less Wrong circles for a couple years. Yudkowsky wrote Inadequate Equilibria in 2017 where he and his wife invented the idea

Uh, no. See "lighting design" [0] and the related field "daylighting" [1].

The more I read of Less Wrong the more it seems More Naive. Lighting solutions and their effects on mood have been explored outside of "Less Wrong circles" for decades, probably for centuries.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architectural_lighting_desig...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylighting

Downvoter(s), care to explain?

I wonder what one gains by using super bright lights. The pupil will adjust to counter the effects of lighting.

Adding more lux just makes your pupil smaller. Or am I missing something? Maybe its non linear? Or maybe the idea is to reach the minimal pupil diameter? Or maybe happiness is somehow dependent on pupil diameter?

On a sunny day, your pupil also adjusts to the effects of lighting.

And yet, people tend to enjoy a sunny day just from the sight. This is attempting to replicate that.

I wonder how important the infrared heat is to the "sight" of a sunny day.

My guess is it's some complex neurological response triggered by 'knowing' (or being sufficiently convinced) that one is surrounded by bright outdoor sunlight, rather than a physiological response powered by the light absorbed by the retina. What matters is the brain's estimate of the current lux value, which would take pupil size into account. This is just a guess.

1. It's not all about eyes. The skin also reacts to light.

2. Even though your pupil shrinks, you get a larger total number of light rays into the eye. Your visual cortex adjusts the image so you don't realize that a sunlit scene is a million times brighter than a lamplit scene. These extra rays may still affect something hormonal.

3. Even if it's partially psychosomatic or placebo, you would still be reinforcing the effect by telling yourself that you're doing it as a substitute.

I've installed eight of these[1] CRI 98+, 5000K, 752 lm strips for a total of ~6000 lm, and during the day I use them in addition to about 3000 lm from two light bulbs, one of which is a nice CRI 90 2700K. I'm very happy with the quality of the light from the strips, though I probably should've gone for a few more. Another pair directly over the computer desk would be nice.

I generally find them uncomfortable when night starts to fall, at which point I just leave the dimmer yellow lights on.

[1] https://www.ledrise.eu/led-strips-modules/led-strips/multiba...

I'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.

There are in fact LED bulbs that aren't overdriven to a deliberate and premature thermal death, but you can only buy them in Dubai: https://youtu.be/klaJqofCsu4

Lightbulbs have a long and very successful history of artificially driving lightbulb lifetimes down though a cartel system: https://youtu.be/j5v8D-alAKE

If you're building your own LED fixtures, you can probably underdrive the LEDs and run them at a radically cooler and slightly more efficient operating point, at a higher upfront cost: you need more LEDs for the same output.

My wife laughs a little at my lighting mania[0].

I bought a bunch of desk lamps and put them around the perimeter of my home office, and equipped each one with a 300W equivalent flood bulb pointed straight up (I like indirect light best). Tied them all with HA so they turn on with the main room light. So when I go into my office and turn on the lights, it's like turning on the sun. Not literally, of course, the sun is pretty bright, but it's a heck of a lot brighter than any other area of the house.

Pretty sure it's the only reason I survive winter in a good mood.

[0] When I go down to the home store, she almost always asks what bulbs I'm looking for this time. LOL

If someone wants to start this company get in touch. At shimmer industries we are building the control system to power this kind of thing. I'm founder and CTO and you can reach me at eskil at shimmerindustries dot com

I used to think about this deeply, and have flipped the idea around - why can't we be doing more work (including writing and other computer work) outdoors?

As a start, I've started https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/ and been going on stretches of doing laptop work outside more. By having a setup where you've either got the screen closer to the face (less glare) or an e-ink display, I've managed being outside for up to a few hours.

The issue I have is that being outdoors is distracting due to constantly changing environment. If I'm trying to deep focus on something, it doesn't help.

Even worse if the environment is somewhat uncontrolled (wilderness, city cafe) as there are potential safety issues if I truly deep focus.

If I'm doing meetings, talking to folks, churning through a bunch of bs tasks, etc. then it's nice.

So far I've been learning this takes time to get used to (i.e. trying for multi-day streaks of trying to work outside), and:

- The ergonomics / screen setup really make a difference in whether you can tolerate being there for 1 hour versus 4 hours.

- I've been pretty intentional about finding spots that have are quiet with some constant (e.g. creekside babbling), if really needed headphones can help deal with wind noise.

- If going to a coffee shop/bar look for places with outdoor seating in a rear area where you're not going to be distracted by cars driving by.

- You'll need some old thin wool gloves with finger cutouts to deal with coldish days.

How cold is coldish?

Oh, when it gets below 60 degrees fahrenheit, or there's a wind. I can probably tolerate working outside as long as it's still sunny down to 50 degrees fahrenheit.

I 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?

https://longnow.org/

To feel special and prompt people to ask about their funny hat

Just wait until after the year 099 and then it might catch on! /s

There's also an alternative approach to put a leading 1 called Holocene Calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

No need to feel bad. Those two didn’t actually “invent” the idea of bright lighting. It’s not a creditable idea, really.

I don't feel bad, I just wanted to make it clear that I wasn't trying to claim some kind of priority.

But this isn't really just a question of "bright lighting", which of course occurs outdoors all the time, anywhere someone is doing arc welding, in any steel mill, etc. It's a more complex proposition: "Possibly seasonal affective disorder is due in significant part to the fact that indoor lighting is almost always orders of magnitude dimmer than sunlight. Possibly indoor lighting is so dim in part because providing sunlight-class lighting with Edison's incandescent lights would be punishingly expensive and require data-center-style massive air conditioning. However, modern high-efficiency LEDs and even fluorescent tubes bring sunlight-class lighting within practical reach of everyday people."

Still, this is hardly a brilliantly original idea on my part, so it's not surprising that the same idea occurred to Eliezer. I was pleased to see that he tried it for his wife's SAD and that it worked.

Photographers often need to build an artificial window or create artificial sunlight. Here's a fairly good tutorial on how to do that using a used satellite dish:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw

Personally I have affixed studio lights to my home office walls, with umbrellas, for Zoom calls (total cost < $200). I find that they also enhance my mood / energy levels, so I switch them on whenever I need to boost my spirit or productivity.

I love the idea of this mirror that sits outside, and moves with the sun, to reflect more sunlight in through your window: https://solenica.com/

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of confidence in it... the company has been looking at building this product since about 2013 (same founder created a similar product on indiegogo called "Lucy") and neither product seems to be on the market yet (uncertain if the indiegogo product shipped).

This assumes you have sunlight outside in the first place.

Quite tangential, but I always giggle at this version of time-is-money "I have already put 6+ hours into researching this idea; I would probably pay at least $400 to get that time back."

I understand the reasoning behind adopting such frames, but for me, this way of thinking wouldn't work at all. At best, it'd be my new procrastination shiney. I find a lot of benefit, and also quite enjoy, quantifying like this at a bigger scale, but micro-rationalising such as this totally doesn't suit my brain. I wonder if it's me or him in the minority?

The "therefore" following from the time-is-money logic (he would pay > $1000 for this product) seems like a pretty alien disconnect for me. My back of envelope would probably be "most people pay between $x-$y for lighting and/or other decor stuff, therefore..." s

I don't disagree on his conclusion (maybe $400-$1200 price point), which makes me wonder if either of us are really arriving at our conclusions in the way we think we are, or just retconning our reasoning using random ideas floating around our minds uselessly.

In any case, I think the overall idea is good and the timing is good. For a start, it's a fairly DIY-ish on the interior design front thing regardless of available products because you can't use 20000 lumen lights the way you would a 200 lumen light.

I take a hobby interest in lighting as design and art, and probably have more lamps than I should have. My personal view is that it's not really an area that is being ignored. There are a lot of companies in this space developing new lighting.

One thing that concerns me about investing a lot into current LED lighting is that it seems like the tech is still evolving. At least that is my impression. I don't really like tech that gives the illusion that it will last a long time but ends up useless after 2 years. I see some really interesting lighting designs but it's all built into the lamp---does this mean lamps, usually a durable good, are just disposable units now? LEDs are supposed to fade over time---what do you do with a perfectly good standard bulb that's producing 25% less light? It still takes up an entire lamp socket. If it's a whole unit, that's a footprint in your home occupying space producing significantly less output.

Some LED bulbs I bought a few years ago are basically outdated in terms of light quality. I think my favorite bulb that I've tried is by Cree. People don't often believe that the difference is noticeable but when I swap out bulbs of various types they can notice how much better a room feels or the colors pop more.

You also can't buy several 'bright home' sunlight level lights cheaply just to see what looks better, so I wonder if this might be an area that keeps brick and mortar lighting stores or sections relevant.

Then there's also the environmental concern of eliminating any of the gains of reduced power consumption by buying more powerful LED bulbs that consume just as much electricity.

Another aside: If you're bored, playing around with lighting in Unreal Engine 5 is pretty fun. UE5 seems very impressive.

IKEA has these backlit fake windows they use in store displays in their curtain section. I wish they would sell the fake windows as well. The light actually looks natural.

In Germany they sell these LED Panels, though not with the same dimensions used for their curtain installations. But unfortunately it looks like they are discontinuing these products. I just searched for "LED Panel" on their website and all listings say "Letzte Chance! Nur noch kurze Zeit erhältlich." (Last chance! Still available for a short time only).

"Natural light" is one of the motivating reasons for open-plan offices, so practical artificial windows could help reverse that trend.

I struggle to believe that this is the case. Many offices are massive single rooms in buildings with large floor plates and often meeting rooms may end up placed around the edge. So in practice I think big open offices (and the desire to have everyone close in one room) tend to lead towards not getting much natural light, but of course if you put smaller offices or cubicles in that space they’d get even less light.

If you ever wondered what makes LED lights feel great: it's the strategic mixing of LEDs with different characteristics.

Here's a free tool that helps designing such fixtures: https://www.meerkatblog.com/ledmixing

I'm confused - most LED will not make you feel great (unlike incandescent light) - on the contrary, you have to put in a lot of effort to get decent light from LEDs.

I think the implied meaning was "how to make LED lighting feel great".

There is a little to no consumer market for quality stuff (ppl buy based on price, maybe lm/W, maybe CRI95+).

You'll see great LED installations at:

- offices & commercial buildings, where it was designed by an engineer

- medical, where identifying things like skin-tone is critical

- transportation (often street lights), where it's optimised for night-time contrast

Not a window-like lamp, but bright LED lights are offered by many higher-end manufacturers such as Delta Light https://www.deltalight.com/en including light-temperature configurable ones such this one: https://www.deltalight.com/en/products/detail/supernova-line...

However, 10klux seems a bit too much, given the energy needed to drive the lamps and overall lamp brightness. Too much light can also have negative effects on the eye and moreover, you would just be unable to read your screen well at 10klux.

We just put in lighting for an entire house. Here's what we learned:

- Even high-end bulbs flicker badly when dimmed. Maybe flickering all the LEDs in the array with different phases would fix this.

- It's illegal to sell bulbs that buzz in California. All our custom fixtures buzz. If you buy high end dimmers, they buzz less, but still buzz. More enforcement of consumer protection laws is needed. Manufacturers should be liable for parts and labor and upgrades if their fixture buzzes with a dimmer that's licensed for sale in the state. Dimmers should be regulated for compatibility with a least-common-denominator LED.

- The current status quo is to buy lights that are brighter than needed, then dim them (California mandates installation of dimmers). This makes no sense. There should be an option to do a lighting simulation of the house, and then use the results of that to remove the dimmer requirements for high-efficiency, properly-sized installs. This helps solve the flickering and buzzing issue.

- The bulbs are all high CRI and matched color temp. They mostly maintain CRI and temp across the dimmable range, but other bulbs I've dealt with in the past did not. Bulb CRI should be rated at the worst-case dimming level.

- There should be a maximum permittible latency for power on of bulbs, again, across the dimming range. Some of our lights take 2 seconds to power on. (Coincidentally, these are probably the most marked up of the fixtures, and the only ones bought from a non-Ikea brick and mortar that operates in California. (These are also the loudest of the buzzers).

- Lutron fixtures are terrible. The smarter the fixture, the worse it is. Many are not fit for purpose. Everyone we've talked to say they're the best available. They should be liable for replacement parts and labor, and more consumer protection laws are needed (around minimum time to power on, correctness of movement / humidity detction, and standardization of the dimming current range, and the user interface of what happens if you push buttons / flip switches. The latter is not standard, even within Lutron's line)

FWIW, I just replaced a lot of bulbs in my house with Philips Hue white ambience bulbs because I'm very sensitive to flickering and we dim a lot. So far, no buzz or flicker. They are expensive, and so is everything in their ecosystem, but I finally have a light I like dimming.

My experience with the Philips Hue was: not bright enough. That was admittedly years ago when they were the new hotness. Perhaps they are brighter now.

Also, I don't want "an app for that" with my lighting.

They recently announced new, brighter lights.

Re the app: then don't use it, just program the hub directly yourself - see https://developers.meethue.com/.

It all runs locally on the hub - I've set it up for auto-day/night colour switching, plus manual override via a switch. I also used a light meter to more precisely tune the colour temperature ;)

I don't know how bright you want them to be. But I've got the 75 watt equivalents and they are usually to bright for us, we dim them slightly.

Ahh. We're talking about different market segments.

The highest performing bulbs we have are also the cheapest. We went with hyperikon bulbs, IKEA pendant fixtures and mid to low end lutron dimmers in some rooms.

Those are totally fine. In hindsight, I'd probably have gone with 100% IKEA pendant fixtures that use standard bulbs and populate them with hyperikon bulbs. Sadly, hyperikon apparently went out of business. Thanks, Covid! Surely some other company makes decent dumb bulbs these days. No idea who, though.

The problems start once you buy modern fixtures, where the LEDs and power converters are integrated into the fixture itself.

> Even high-end bulbs flicker badly when dimmed.

Dimming is crap. I'll go so far as to say it causes subconscious anxiety and stress — obviously negating any positive effect the light brings.

I rotate my hands quickly between my eyes and the lights when I'm at a store to look for strobing when dimmed. Any strobing and I am not on board.

> Maybe flickering all the LEDs in the array with different phases would fix this.

I doubt it. A truly "smart" light would, IMHO, cluster LED's in parallel banks and when asked to dim, disable whole banks.

The cost then is in the controller within the bulb but I expect this would be cheap enough.

Then of course dimming happens in "steps" but I would take that trade-off for non-flicker.

> Dimming is crap.

Agreed LED dimming is crap, but incandescent is not so bad. Mainly because it dims toward red, simulating the day -> sunset -> fire transition. Apart from flickering, my gripe with LED is that it stays a constant color which looks unnatural even with a 2700K bulb.

That's interesting: trying to track the color temperature curve as the bulb dims.

this is actually immensely helpful as someone in the middle of a renovation.

We're planning on having a combination of 'direct' light from bulbs and cans as well as dimmable (and tunable color temp) LED strip lighting that throws indirectly into the ceiling. The frustration with residential dimmers (really all residential versions of things) is so true.

Before we moved out for demolition we did some mockup testing and were just blown away by the effect of adding light to spaces. The house already has a ton of windows but the mockups had what would be considered and 'unreasonably high' amount of light by most design standards. That being said, we were so happy with the results, especially in the morning and early afternoon.

I think bright room lighting is a very promising avenue for SAD and circadian rhythm issues.

Last year, for my house plants, I suspended a pair of 100w full spectrum grow lights in my living room. Throughout the winter I've been using my kitchen table as a workspace and I swear this is the first time in my life that I've completely avoided SAD and my circadian rhythm has been sufficiently advanced that I'm now a morning person. In my configuration the lights are suspended behind me, the glare from having them in direct eyesight is problematic.

Has been absolutely wonderful and can definitely recommend giving it a try, the "quantum board" full spectrum lamps are getting really affordable.

I think a better option would be to use a light pipe like Solar Tube[0][1]. I've worked in an office with one and it was just wonderful. Natural sunlight is just so invigorating, I can't really explain it.

Anyway, these tubes don't seem to be too expensive and they are basically free to operate. And with modern head units they seem to capture the most sunlight possible, even on overcast days.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP2APH2TKyY [1] https://solatube.com/

I always wanted to build a "periscope windows".

Have a large light-gathering lens on the outside, then focus the rays into a much thiner "sun tunnel", bring them underground (in the same shaft as the water and heating pipes), then expand the rays into a fake window. If this was possible it would completely change the way we build homes, we could have many underground floors with "periscope windows" and a towers of light gathering lenses on the roof.

Unfortunately this is not physically possible, not just a real picture but not even the light can be made parallel this way. (Maybe some quantum tech will make this possible one day.)

Not possible.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/413990

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etendue#Conservation_of_etendu...

Yep, that is my question :)

Quite an interesting topic. What would be a good software setup in order to measure LED characteristics (or at least compare them)? I'd like to compare different lights' output power and spectrum using a simple phone camera.

I'd also be interested in this.

I bought a 4-in-1 E27 socket adapter and plugged 4x 16W bright (1400 lumen), high CRI (>97) Livarno Lux LED bulbs into it for my home office and it's been great, but having it brighter would be even better!

I wish they'd talked about running costs as well as the price of parts in the 'costs' section. It's the electricity bill that puts me off. Unless it can be... solar powered?

From the article:

"Full-spectrum LEDs seem to output about 75 lumens per watt, so if our panel is 20k lumens then we should expect our panel to draw 266 watts. This seems reasonable to me. If you leave it on 8 hours a day, you’re going to use 25 cents per day in electricity (at $.12 per kWh)."

Almost anything can be solar powered.

I bought a studio LED panel from Amazon (for videography generally). It came with a stand that attaches to the desk to be used as a webcam light but I mounted it on a shelf and it hangs over my head like the sun. It has a 3000k-8000k temperature range and that and the brightness can be controlled by a remote. There are a bunch like this available under different brand names. For the price I've found it to be a good solution for now and I also have a photography light as a bonus.

This is pitched as (1) a treatment for SAD and (2) something people would like.

And that's great, but I want to consider something else -- one of the best theories of civilization-caused myopia is that it's caused by insufficient exposure to sunlight. And the table in the post is certainly circumstantial evidence supporting that theory:

> Direct sunlight shines 100k lux

> Full daylight (indirect) is more than 10k lux

> Indoor office lighting is typically 500

That's a big difference. What if illuminating the indoors at 10,000 lux prevented people from developing myopia?

There seems to have been a fair amount of research into this based on the COVID lockdowns around the world. One such study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33443542/

You may be interested in the following video, where a quadruple board certified doc reviews relevant literature regarding sun exposure (and the critical wavelengths involved) and various facets of health: https://youtu.be/5YV_iKnzDRg

The review paper that ties many different findings from different fields (optics, endocrinology, circadian rhythms...) together with an audacious spoonful of hypothesizing is this: http://melatonin-research.net/index.php/MR/article/view/19/2...

I light my office with two LED corn bulbs that collectively deliver 24,000 lm (equivalent to 15 or 16 100W incandescent bulbs) but consume only 200W and cost $140. They were super-easy to install because they just went into the standard sockets I already had.

I've just published a blog post about this: https://blog.plover.com/tech/corn-bulbs.html

I completely agree. For a simple solution, I got a bunch of these led tubes [1] and used double sided tape [2] to attach them to the ceiling.

1. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FBBJ4KL 2. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VNSXY31

I can find dozens of "bright lights" in a Finnish online store. Looking at the specs of one of them (https://www.verkkokauppa.com/fi/product/714353/Innolux-Epic-...), it promises 1500 lux when sitting half a meter from the lamp.

Home lighting solutions are absolutely shit. Idk why nobody has invented anything better but there could be so much more light in our houses with modern tech.

I think the problem really is cost. Good lighting costs 1000s of dollars and it really hasn’t been accepted socially that a modern house needs that like it does a fancy kitchen or an ac unit.

Fundamentally lighting is a hardware business and hardware isn’t very profitable

Yes, with LED lighting we have entered a whole new world of lighting possibilities that I think designers, builders, manufacturers are just slowly opening their eyes to.

Forget your smart homes, lighting (even decorative) is where it is at.

I feel like I've gained a nice incremental improvement in lighting just by changing all my bulbs to high CRI LEDs with around 5000-5500K color temperature. The perceived brightness is higher than with typical "soft white" bulbs, and it even feels better being in the room. The biggest problem I have yet to solve is that my living room has no overhead lighting.

See also "100,000 lumens to treat seasonal affective disorder: A proof of concept RCT of bright, whole-room, all-day (BROAD) light therapy" on https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.29.21265530v...

I think circadian lighting will take off soon - something like Phillips Hue but cheaper, simpler, and much brighter bulbs (for simulating daylight). Set and forget for bright morning / day and dim amber at night with simple physical controls for overrides (if you’re having a late night party or something).

Phillips makes a bulb that “yellows” based on how dim or bright the bulb is. I use these plus Luetron smart dimmers to automatically remove blue color temperatures from my house after sunset.

Bright lights give me a headache, especially in midday when it's bright outside. I'll often resort to wearing sunglasses indoors when it gets out of hand.

Perhaps it's a certain kind of light, but I don't get the same kind of headache outside in bright lights. (Although I do find bright days painful.)

A = 4 pi r^2

So a sphere of 2m radius has a surface of about 50 m^2.

A 1000 lumen bulb illuminates the sphere with app 1000 lm / 50 m^2 = 20 lux (not 50 lux as OP wrote).

So the calculation is a bit off. OTOH if we had bulbs that shine downwards only it would be sufficient to just divide by the floor. So 100,000 lm in a 10m^2 room gets you 10,000 lux.

> Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company

I would totally support a crowd-funding of a company for making such an arrangement accessible to people around the world, using flat-packaged parts and installable by mere mortals.

... preferably with the blue-scattering effect as well :-)

Unsurprisingly, this exists. There are entire home lighting stores, and if they won't do, try going to a photography store.

I don't understand blog articles of the form "I listened to Elizier Yudkowsky, and I agree, this thing I can totally buy today should be created."

So... has anyone actually started a company to do this? I'd be a very interested customer. (Comment written from a basement office lit unsatisfactorily by cheap photography studio lights)

For anyone interested in doing real lighting CAD and simulation, one of the true professional-grade tools for architectural lighting design is available for free. Dialux Evo is a great tool, though there's a bit of a learning curve.

I’m very interested to learn lighting design towards creating intimate, cozy, warm indoor spaces. Any advice on where I can learn more of the err “Art of Lighting Design”? I have a design degree so I’m across general colour and design theories but seeking resources specifically about lighting spaces using a more opinionated approach/ set of principals.

Coelux - mentioned in the article - has built a very expensive ($30k) but also very realistic product. Wondering if it can get to mass production and maybe cost $3k?

I have done something like this myself. I did the simpler thing of simply buying a single 150W high lumen high lux LED bulb. It's very bright. It's maybe an 70% solution.

The other hack you can find is to look at "warehouse" lights or outdoor flood lights. Those things are very powerful on their own.

Yeah, definitely not the first to consider this. I remember my Dad experimenting with proper lightning (brightness and spectrum) in the early to mid 2000s, and to him that was not really that novel.

In my office room (32m²/340sqft), I use a commercial rail lightning system with three channels/phases (controlled via a Sonoff 4CH WiFi switch). Those are commonly used in stores, and I got my rails cheap via the local craigslist-equivalent. With 8m of rails (2m not attached, yet) I am very flexible with light positioning and can adjust the "light mode" for different room usages. Drawback: I am not somebody to buy light fixtures for a thousand bucks, so I found it difficult to find appropriate-but-still-cheap fixtures. For ambient light (not so bright) I got lucky with these cheap GU10 holders [1], into which I put some decent bulbs (3000k, CRI90+, 410lumen, dimmable, flickerfree [2]). As "desklights" I have bright spots (6400k, CRI95+, 1350lumen, 24deg [3]), which should give about 5000 to 7000lux with three lamps. The 6400k is a bit cold and the bulbs are non-replaceable, but other LED alternatives would have been much more expensive, so I got these to experiment with. So far I am happy.

One interesting alternative are metal-halide lamps[4]: Those can often be bought in used condition for cheap, and offer replaceable bulbs by default (G12 socket). They are only little less energy efficient than my high CRI LEDs, and the spectrum also seems to be quite good. However, they start at 35W (e.g. 4200k, CRI91, 3400lumen) and don't seem to be dimmable. For a single spot that's a bit much, and spreading the light on the ceiling by using three or four is a bit expensive with our energy prices. They also have some additional drawbacks like warmup and cooldown times. Though maybe I'll modify one or two with WiFi switches so I can use them to boost the normal desklight using some Home Assistant automations.

[1] https://www.ledpanelgrosshandel.de/3-phasenspot-schienenleuc... [2] https://www.greenandco.de/en/seocrap/a-100081 [3] https://www.reichelt.de/de/en/15w-led-tracklight-colorcode-6... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal-halide_lamp

Metal halide lose efficacy quite quickly but you can't see it by eye, check the rated hours.

Also, the Lumiere usually has a glass pane it, this blocks the UV - extended exposure to the bulb direct without these panes of glass is definately harmful, eg cataracts, melanoma etc

once it becomes a $1000 product, the number you can sell dramatically decreases. Hence, these existing products that do this are $10,000 and up.

The price has little to do with the R&D and manufacturing cost, it really has to do with how small the market is. Once you have a customer that is willing to pay $1,000 for this novelty, they will likely also pay $10k for the novelty.

Also....I seriously doubt artificially extending daylight hours is good for anyones health.

The article didn't mention anything about vitamin D, which I probably care more about than feeling like the artificial light is real sunlight.

You need UV light to generate vitamin D, which you probably don't want in your house (it will cause color fading and deterioriation in fabrics, upholstery, etc.)

i still use 2 x 250W (5000lm) halogen sticks in a 6x3m room, for ~15 years. it's not enough and not flat, i know. (still much better than any stupid chandeler, like 2000lm).

i have tried and tried several CRI90 and CRI95 LED lights, bulbs and strips, but the spectre is not same. Like Fruits look different. Ah, May try some panels too. Of course, none of the price-of-secondhad-car ones.

Interesting to see someone else working on the problem of bright indoor lighting. I've been searching for a good solution to the "indoor light not bright enough" problem for some time, and here's some stuff I've tried:

-IKEA NOT ($10 floor lamp) lights with a bunch of light bulb splitters and at least two giant high-CRI twister CFL bulbs for photo studios from Amazon. These are truly massive and look like a normal CFL light bulb, but are about a foot long. Two of them consume 130W at the wall, and put out a rather large amount of light. Managed to get about 1000 lux at the desk this way. Unfortunately you can only get them in 5000K and 6500K. The daylight color may bother some people at night. Furthermore, they are undimmable.

-Track lighting with six IKEA TRADFRI tunable white bulbs on it, in an L shape following my desk. IKEA bulbs supposedly reach 90 CRI, and these can be color tuned (arbitrarily if you use the hub and the HomeKit app, not just 3 levels) and dimmed. At 1000lm, they are the brightest tunable white bulbs on the market commonly imo (most are 800). The range of color tuning is rather low, 2700-4000K. This is because the bulb never turns off the warm channel I think. Furthermore, at 4000K, the light is slightly greenish.

Some notes:

-I definitely find dimmable and/or color tunable bulbs to be useful, because at night, extremely bright or white light isn't extremely helpful for sleep.

-I found that high room brightness might make it difficult to see a computer screen that isn't turned up all the way.

-I found that if the lights were mounted overhead-ish, and were really individually bright, they would cause annoying glare under some circumstances

Some more hardware developmenty stuff I looked into:

-LED strips. High CRI tunable white LED strips are available on AliExpress, along with the LED channels to run them. Actually getting a constant current supply and appropriate power rigged up is an exercise left for the reader. Unfortunately, LED strips use resistors for constant current, so waste a little bit of power there.

-Building a custom LED plate for the Tradfri lights that used Lumileds chips capable of 95 CRI. I built and tested one, and still have the files if someone should want to try. It doesn't expand the tuning range much at all.

-Designing my own LED bulbs. This is a project in progress. I found some LED chips on DigiKey from Bridgelux (V6 Thrive array) and some giant BR40 bulbs at a local store for 3 bucks each that still have a massive heat sink on them to modify. The heat sink gets up to 60C with 18W input to the LEDs at 25C ambient. The LED chips are capable of outputting 98 CRI and come much closer to approximating sunlight than anything else I've found by wavelength/spectrum.

Hopefully someone finds something here useful.

Now I want to make a fake window for my bathroom, what have you done OP? Just when I finished my DIY window-fitted planter.

Metal-halide HID lamps are best for this purpose. They have the best colour rendition of all lighting and they come in different sizes and colour temperatures.

My pick for a bright daylight would be about 6000K colour temp and I’d just throw some fittings in a room then walk outside at mid day to determine how many watts Id need to satisfy.

Bonus of these is you can get coloured lamps with more awesomer colours than LEDs.BLV is one manufacturer.

Second bonus is if you use a grow lamp in your setup, it’ll also help reduce the effects of SAD. They use the same fittings.

Oh, and remember diffusion is the key for comfortable indoor use.

What about an orange-light lighting company which fixes all the awful blue streetlights we drive by?

Not "20K lux", but I've spent a fair bit of time improving the lighting in my 1970s home. The thinking back then seemed to be "What's the minimum we can get away with", leading to a dark, shadowy mess.

People have been using broken LCD TVs to build "artificial skylights" for years. I came very close to building one, but my wife balked at me spending $50 on a broken 55" TV. <shrug> :-)

I recommend searching amazon and home improvement websites for "led panel lights", which seem to be a very similar premade light. They come in many sizes and shapes, many of them are meant for 2x2 or 4x2 foot drop ceiling installation, but others are designed for flush surface mount on drywall.

I put, as a test, a 12" round one in our small laundry room, and the light it makes is a great upgrade from the can light that used to be in there.

For my garage, where I didn't want to spend $600 on a bunch of the panels, I got a dozen LED strip lights that look kind of like tube lights, and spread them all over the ceiling. Provides a nice, even, bright light for when I use it as a workshop. However, over the last 18 months I've had pretty much every one of them "burn out" at least once. I'm guessing that it is the 120V power supply built into each unit that is the problem. The vendor has been good about sending me replacements, they have a 3 year warranty, but I think when they fail again (I'm assuming they will) that I will probably look at either just using 24v LED strips directly, and a ceiling mounted Meanwell powersupply, or maybe I'll look at some of these panel lights.

Another thing I want to do for the garage lights is split them into two groups. Right now I have one switch that controls them all, but I have had limited luck getting my kids to regularly turn them off, leaving 300W of lights burning for hours. I'd probably set up maybe 4 of them to go on from the main switch and the other 10 to have another, less convenient, switch for when I'm doing workshop stuff.

No mention of tint, only color temperature.

> In my experimentation I discovered that I liked closer to 5000 in the mornings and closer to 2700 in evenings.

The color temperature of the sun at noon is 5000K. So at noon, you want your light to be 5000K or higher, especially outdoors (who needs auxiliary light outdoors at noon? Exactly. High color temperatures are bullshit.) But it really has more to do with eyes than the sun: the more dark adaptation your eyes currently have, the more that blue, cooler light is blinding, the more warmer light is comfortable. I don't know what it is about old timers that insist on using 6500K light even after midnight. They are literally blinding themselves and slowly doing permanent damage to their eyes. Light that cool is unnatural, and I suppose that part of the attraction, but mostly it is the mistake of believing that the brighter a light appears, the more you can see. This is completely false, of course. Beyond low light levels, brightness has absolutely nothing to do with what can be seen. The accuracy of color rendition is more important than brightness in regards to what can be seen, and the state of one's eyes is more important than brightness in regards to what can be seen. It is very possible to likely that one can see more with dark adapted eyes in the dark than with 2000Lm of 6500K light.

Also not mentioned is drivers, and this is critical. Manufacturers are using the cheapest crap they can find, which means there's a lot of LED drivers out there with PWM. There is a huge rift in the lumens community about PWM, so much so that it is mostly banned from being discussed. The tl;dr is that PWM sucks and hurts some people, causes migraines, but some people don't notice PWM, and many of them are so egotistical and bereft of empathy that they don't care about anything that doesn't affect them.

In order of importance, a half-decent light should have

1) No PWM, nor anything like it, instead the driver should employ constant current

2) Good tint (neutral white, like white sand... without any green or yellow cast, but a rosy cast is ok)

3) 3200K to 5200K color temperature (depends on the eyes, which depends on the time of day)

and at a very distant last:

4) effective brightness

The only reason why most old CRT displays were calibrated for a 6500 K color temperature was because the red phosphor had a lower efficiency than the others.

Using a white with less red and more green and blue allowed the vendors to advertise a higher brightness for the displays.

The same reason applied to fluorescent lamps. Choosing 6500 K allowed the vendors to advertise a higher luminous flux at a given electrical power.

Nowadays there is absolutely no technical reason to use a white with the 6500 K color temperature, even if the low-quality LED lamps with a single orange phosphor still have better efficiency when emitting more bluish light, but those have a too low CRI to be an acceptable lighting solution.

Nevertheless, for the lighting of my home I do not like a too yellowish white, so I use LEDs with the 4000 K color temperature, which, unfortunately, are much harder to find than those with a yellowish 2700 K or a bluish 6500 K.

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