Hacker News Reader

Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

I changed my home office to my “luminarium” where I’m using about 700W of LED bulbs to get my lux to around 10,000. It’s a necessity that I use light mode, it’s impossible to see dark mode.

Also it effectively cured my SAD.

View on HN

700 real watts or equivalent watts?

700 real watts of LED has got to be intense. Also your room would be very hot.

I routinely run 350 real watts, and go up to 1400 when I really need light. Helps with heating, but doesn't get all that hot.

1400 Watt of LEDs is the kind of lighting you'll find atop a tall pole in a sports stadium. That's ~200,000 lumen, or about 10x as much as you'd need to light a large room really brightly. If you put that next to a skylight, it would make the sun look dim. It's certainly not impossible, but that's a lot for a single point light source.

What are your rooms like? Do you live in a castle?

I have 2x SmallRig RC 350D [1] and Godox M600bi [2]. These are medium-spec videography lights that draw their rated power from the wall. Lux @ 3m is noticeably (10x) dimmer than the sun.

I have tripped my breaker when running the setup, so I run from two outlets on two breakers. For my current (quite large) room, I'd love to upgrade to the 5000W lights (Nanlux Evoke 5000B or the Aputure STORM XT52), but electrical wiring would be a hassle. For a standard room, I find 700W to be sufficient.

I also backed this project - https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/brighter-the-world-s-brig... - been following them since their Show HN.

[1] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1729860-REG/smallrig_... [2] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1715199-REG/godox_kno...

The sun is really bright. My outdoor Hue sensor regularly reads 50k+ lux in sunlight. A room in my house with 100 watts of LEDs reads ~300 lux from the sensor on my dresser.

Yeah it’s truly astonishing how bright the sun is when you start trying to recreate it at home. But my room is brighter inside than an overcast winter day outside! That was my goal, and it’s substantially improved my mood. I’d do a write up but my strategy has been “keep buying lights until it feels bright enough and distribute them around the room”. I should probably get a real lux meter I’ve just been using my phone which seems a bit off.

For reference, this is a 1200 watt stadium light: https://www.ledlightingsupply.com/led-outdoor-lights/led-flo...

So it's not unfair to say that you're off by a order of magnitude. For a single stand, 2 orders if counting all the stands.

1400 W is a lot by conventional room lighting standards, but not if your objective is recreating daylight indoors.

This is what a 20kW incandescent bulb looks like in a home/backyard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT5_-A0m8_U

I can’t believe he did that in an enclosed space. “It’s like having a bonfire in the room” indeed.

Before I even click that link I'm going to assume it's photoninduction.

Edit: It was! That mad lad!

700 watt space heaters seem pretty common. I’d expect the heat produced by 700 watts of LEDs to be just a tiny bit less than the space heaters (as some of the energy will sneak out the window, photons being sneaky fellows).

Real watts. I’m working on getting more. I only use it in the winter when I’d be running a space heater anyway. So I’m not wasting electricity I’m just making a useful byproduct.

My dad also did that to my house too, and I had to try to find a corner dark enough to see my editor in dark mode lol

As a real Stan for good indoor lighting, I would like to know more about your setup.

I’m still experimenting, but right now it’s 28 bulbs attached to my ceiling fan with some 7-way splitters (the ceiling fan is an old one that supports 4 100W bulbs), two big corn bulbs, one 100W and one 250W, I’m still trying to figure out the best way to mount these. Then I had my daughter paint some art and I framed it using LED light strips, I’m gonna put it on the wall.

I haven’t really figured out a good way to diffuse the 250w corn bulb, its blinding to look at and it’s absolutely massive. Maybe I could use ABS and 3D print a translucent shroud and mounting bracket for it.

I had another 100W corn bulb that didn’t use a fan and it burned out after about a year.

I’ll be honest right now I’m in a transition period of moving rooms so I’ll often just spend 30 minutes in there in the morning, although last year I spent 8 hours a day in there. It really helped me during the big snowstorm the Midwest US had recently. I just bought cheap 200W equivalent LED bulbs until I got to the full 28, because that was super easy, then I’ve started experimenting.

In winter time when the sun is shining directly into the window that’s still brighter, but that happened maybe a dozen times over the last 80 days, even with a south facing window. This winter was super dreary.

Sorry I’m rambling, but Maybe at some point I’ll worry about CRIs but this was mostly an experiment. It has definitely helped but if you like indoor lighting you probably already know that.

Its not rambling if its useful. I have some crazy led cob lights that look like street lights when they're on. I might try them indoors. I have spares for my outdoor ones.

I might comment wattage and lux if I can, couple days.

The idea of 28 bulbs hanging off a ceiling fan sounds hilarious. Good on you though for finding what works and getting it done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com