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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

Could we just have rooms lit as strongly as outdoors?

There's an increasing body of good evidence that bright indoor conditions also lift mood and improve productivity, often quite noticeably.

Since the pandemic and work-from-home, I've been working in a home office where an entire wall is a glass door leading to the balcony, floor to ceiling. I let the light stream in, and it's basically daylight inside. I had to get a brighter monitor (600 nit OLED), but now I just can't picture myself going back to work in a gloomy cubicle farm. The grey, dim light would just depress me.

There's a few hobbyists using large LED or OLED panels to achieve the same kind of lighting effect as overhead sunlight. Because of the higher efficiency, it's now possible to do this without an extravagant power bill or excessive heat. This makes the most sense is in places closer to the arctic, where winters are long, dark, and cold. So in effect, the "wasted" heat energy of the lighting simply contributes to heating the workplace or home.

Here on YC News more than a few people have suggested that this might be a nice startup to work on: "indoor sunlight" products and installation services can start small, but can scale up! You can also imagine combo products, such as solar-power + batteries + bright lighting panels.

I spent 80% of my career in gloomy interior spaces with low intensity fluorescent lighting that beat with the cathode ray tube monitors' scanning.

I was much happier when I could snag a space with a window once in awhile.

There's an amazing youtuber/creator I've been following for a while and he does exactly this. Goes into the science of what it takes, and the results are really stunning. I'd love to give something like this a try, just need time.

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

Also there was a breakthrough a while ago with LED ceiling lights that mimic natural sun. I haven't heard much since their release, so I'm sure cost is still a major issue for these sadly.

https://www.zmescience.com/science/physics/artificial-light-...

The length people go to in order not to leave the house…

These techniques would be very useful in the three darkest months in Scandinavia, where the sun is down both when you leave and return from work, and generally behind clouds otherwise.

Me, I’ll climb the floors of the office and stand in a windowed stairwell with the sun in my eyes for ten minutes after lunch every day, when the weather’s good, but that’s being kind of anal about it.

You can’t blame him — he seems to be from UK, they see the sun there maybe 4 times a year.

That is really not true.

True. It’s at least 5 times a year.

The sarcastic self deprecating English in me wanted to say “well at least 4 days”, but we’ve had a pretty good run this year. We are up to at least 6 (lol, still can’t make myself say you are wrong..)

Where I live we have sun 18-22 hours a day in summer and maybe 4 hours in the winter - the sun doesn't even go halfway up before going down again on those days.

Unfortunately me and my partner both have our families here so moving is not an option. Being able to see decently strong light in December without having to travel would be worth a lot to me.

If you are a photographer, this would be epic.

I looked and even on cloudy days it's orders of magnitude brighter than my brightest light.. so I just went outside

For the visible portion, that's around 25-50 W/m², so around double that for current LEDs. The question becomes: at what illumination do we start to get a significant effect?

Short answer, yes.

Long answer, you'll need to really jack up the power consumption. Replicating a thing that in itself an energy source needs waaaay more than just a 60W light bulb.

60W would be some 10 LED lights that each are 100W equivalents to old glow lights. That would probably already do the trick in a small room.

Do people really still use old “light bulbs”?

> 60W would be some 10 LED lights that each are 100W equivalents to old glow lights. That would probably already do the trick in a small room.

Not really, daylight is not 10 times but much more brighter than a 100w incandescent lamp, such illumination (e.g. it has certain uses to help seasonal depression) exists but it's very bright compared to normal indoors lighting.

The old 100w lamps were ~1600 lumens; outdoors daylight is something like 10k lumens/square meter in shade (direct sunlight would be another order of magnitude more), and an appropriate number for the surfaces of a small room would be in the ballpark of 100 of such LEDs so 600w of electricity.

Interesting! Thanks for the correction.

Yes, I do. Where I live, winters are long, so none of the heat is wasted. But that aside, the real reason is the quality of the light. Spectra! Incandescent lighting is a black body radiator basically, so you will have a full spectra curve even if it is weighted toward the red side. The downside of LEDs (and the CCFLs that preceded them) is that they only have a few narrow peaks in the spectra, R G B at differing heights and the rest of it is low. This is why colour rendition generally looks poor, and even worse, they flicker! Because we live in a society that wants everything as cheap as possible, the LEDs generally flicker at 60 or 120 Hz, sometimes higher. This causes a strobing effect, etc. This can be avoided by using DC current, but who uses that? CCFLs used electronic ballasts with much higher rates but they're not on the market anymore. Incandescents have a small degree of flicker too, but it's basically non-existent because as black-body radiators they continue glowing until the next pulse arrives.. LEDs are not like that, they are instant on-off, and their "dimming" trick is usually pulse-width-modulation where they're still fully light, but their duty cycle is spaced further apart, you think it is dimmer but it is not.

LEDs are a terrible technology for lighting.

It would be really fun if the whole reasons why I don't wear glasses is because I keep strong light in my room since I was a kid (I like strong light)

Sometimes, the glass ceiling isn’t a metaphor.

Yes! I'm experimenting with this right now with a very bright, color temp adjustable, high-CRI photography lamp, and the difference is, well, night and day. There are several good posts out there on the subject.

what about go outside?

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