The issue is that all white leds are made by shining a blue led at a yellow phosphor. Rhe blue and yellow balance to whatever temp you pick, but it is still a lot of blue.
Here's a good selection of research papers https://www.bioshumanlight.com/research/ . It seems like there might be some adverse effect due to the peak at the lower end of the blue spectrum. I'm waiting for the BIOS team to do a consumer product.
this comment makes no sense. even assuming these things are equal, no one is just out there staring at the sky for hours on end for the small percentage of time the sky is actually blue.
So when you're at the beach, hiking, or driving on the highway, what are you looking at instead? The blue sky is going to be most of your field of view unless you just stare at the ground.
Yes it does! A giant spike in the blue region is literally what makes the sky blue in the first place. If there weren't such a spike the sky would be white. When you look up at the sky on a typical clear day, you're getting more blue light than almost any one of these indoor setups.
If you look at 460-470 nm where the spike is in the LED spectrum, it's much lower in the blue sky spectrum.
I think the concern is something about the relative amounts of blue light. Not sure what exactly but something like, the human perception of brightness and therefore the self protection of the eye is calibrated for natural light, so the pupil contraction, looking away, etc, is not done correctly in with that unnatural distribution. Anyway I don't know if that's a real effect, but that's what people (should) mean when they're talking about "too much blue".
When David Chapman's "You need more lumens" article came out (which is referenced in the original post), I was on the verge of building a similar setup but at some point read similar concerns on light therapy. Not necessarily effects on circadian rhythm, but retinal damage from staring close to the amount of light.
From https://meaningness.com/metablog/sad-light-lumens : "The clinical studies were done with 10,000 lux provided by a bank of fluorescent tubes in a box that directed most of the light forward. Very roughly, if you are a couple feet from a box like that, 1 lumen produces 1 lux." It'd be interesting to see studies that have these lighting setups but don't involve staring towards them.
The setup that I'm happy enough with: a set of LIFX bulbs in normal light fixtures. They seem to put out more lumens (1100 lumens) than other color-changing led bulbs. If you don't want 'smart' lighting but still want the ability to change color temperature, Philips makes "SceneSwitch" lights (800 lumens) that will cycle color temperature based on turning on/off.
I use a bank of blue LEDs aimed up at a white ceiling for the winter so I spent some time looking into the question. I didn't find anything very definite or concerning.
Note that there is a whole snake oil thing going on with blue light these days. Some of what we see about this stuff might be coming out of that particular industry.
> Isn’t this expensive to run? It draws about 2 kWh per day (assuming 8h of usage), which costs about $0.30 at typical rates. This is comparable to one day of a modern fridge or one load of laundry. Power is cheap, folks!
But it will offset your other heat sources.
If you live alone, you can treat it like a room heater and lower the temperature for the rest of your home.
Since the bulb is radiating heat some degree of heat, you may be able to keep the temperature of the room you’re in lower without feeling cooler.
2 kWh is kind of nuts. Yes, it's in the same order of magnitude than the fridge and washing machine, but those already tend to be the largest consumers of electricity in a household, unless you're doing cooling or heating with electrity. And a modern fridge suitable for 2 to 3 persons will be more like 0.5 kWh per day and a load of laundry is < 1 kWh.
And if you're trying to light your whole house this way you may need three or four of these bulbs. I guess you'd just keep whichever is in the room you're in on though.
Three standard 60 W incandescent bulbs will draw just under 2 kWh in 10 hours, and not too long ago it was completely normal to have many more of these on at the same time.
While LEDs do produce some waste heat, efficient ones convert 50%+ of the input power to visible light, so it's less than you might think (compare to ~10% for incandescents, iirc). The bulb I have doesn't have a perceptible effect on my room temperature (although I guess it probably does cause the thermostat to turn on a tiny bit less often).
Can you give an example of an LED bulb installation with 50%+ luminous efficacy? Perhaps you are thinking of the raw lumens/watt coming out of lab-grade LED material without considering other system draws (cooling, power conversion)?
Every few years some company/research lab will claim they have a technology that’ll simulate sunlight coming through a window, but it still isn’t something one can buy.
The moment we can buy eg a 3ft by 1ft panel that we can just mount on a wall and feels like an actual sunlit window for a few thousands dollars or so, interior design is likely going to get radically different.
(And that’s not to mention the sci-fi dream of a screen that can simulate a window looking out on any landscape, but these are probably way further out)
When we were building out an office that only had a few windows I went looking for, and found one of these. Unfortunately it’s $60k instead of $2k. According to reviewers that saw it, it’s amazing.
Apparently it uses some nanoscale material that produces (mimics?) Rayleigh scattering.
I don't think the trick is the Rayleigh scattering, I think it's the parallel rays. Notice how all the pictures have well defined shadows of parallel rays?
I started to look into this and from a brief readings of the patents it seems that the magic sauce is Rayleigh scattering by shining an LED light onto a sandwich of two transparent panels and a solid layer of silica aerogel. I couldn't find the thickness of the aerogel layer, which will determine if you get more blue or red light out of the sandwich.
It's quite ingenious, the aerogel consists of silica nanoparticles with a size distribution smaller than the wavelength of the light, leading to Rayleigh scattering to dominate. The non-uniformity of the aerogel structure is what gives it the more nuanced lighting, it lets a bit of yellow light, a bit of this and that, making a non-monochromatic source that resembles sunlight very well.
Have a look at https://www.coelux.com/.
(Not affiliated, I just like the concept.
But AFAIK their 'panels' still are 50+ cm thick and outside your as well as my price range.)
I was hoping someone would mention this. Have you seen the product in person? I’d be very curious whether it lives up to how good it looks on video.
For those unfamiliar, the panel simulates Rayleigh scattering to give the appearance of a blue sky, with a simulated sun and close to incandescent color rendering. Too bad the price tag still seems to be in the tens of thousands though.
What you want is, first, a strong source and second parallel rays (not radial rays like omnidirectional light bulbs). The later is the hard part. Because of conservation of etendue, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etendue#Conservation_of_etendu...) it's difficult to have very parallel rays unless the source is small and/or far away. Most spotlights still have relatively wide angles of radiation. I wonder if something like this might work if well placed: https://www.amazon.com/Primelux-8-inch-14400-Lumens-Driving/...
I'm extremely light sensitive, and so have built quite a few DIY solutions in order to alleviate my S-A-D symptoms.
One of my systems may have been a bit over powered and over used, as I developed what a doctor friend later diagnosed as "light induced hypomania", which was quite an experience.
> One of my systems may have been a bit over powered and over used, as I developed what a doctor friend later diagnosed as "light induced hypomania",
I would note that light-therapy lamps for SAD have clear instructions to not sit in front of them for more than an hour-or-so at a time. Your body really does just go on producing more dopamine as long as you're sitting there.
This is great to see, for I've been wondering lately why being outdoors is more pleasant (in clement weather) than indoors. Is it the unpredictability? the humidity? the noises? the sunlight?
In that same vein, I've wondered how to simulate outdoor conditions inside, especially something approximating more light, in part because I think a family-member is mildly susceptible to seasonal affective disorder. I can't wait to see what the author has to say.
I’ve also been wondering this lately. In particular if I’m feeling slightly ill, I feel much better outdoors. At least in my experience, it isn’t necessarily sunlight as I think it’s also better at night. And it isn’t super “fresh” air or hearing birdsong or the wind rustling through trees (positive things I associate with being outdoors) as I live in a city. I hadn’t thought about humidity. Currently my best guesses are:
- a correlation between being outdoors and stood up and moving
- colder temperature (but I guess in the summer when it’s not stifling it can be preferable to be out so maybe this is wrong)
- some psychological/placebo effect
- less CO2 in the air. I can’t really put any numbers to this hypothesis as I don’t have a meter.
I.e. I think air quality is likely a big factor. When it's windy and I get good airflow through my room it doesn't feel as different from outside. It's probably not only CO2, but also dust, VOCs, funghi, microorganisms, etc.
Furniture, flooring and carpeting contribute towards indoor air pollution. For example, glues used in laminate flooring can release formaldehyde into the air for decades at room temperature or warmer.
I’ve recently started buying high CRI LEDs and I’ve noticed a difference in how the room looks and feels. The older LEDs while can be bright just aren’t bright in the same way.
comparing lighting to the consumption of a fridge, which is one of the most energy intensive appliances in an average house, is kinda ridiculous. Its like saying your lawn mower energy use is just fine because it consumes the same as your SUV.
Tl;dr: 2kwh per day for a light is a LOT. A standard led light would consume about 5% of that.
Three incandescent light bulbs that would have been standard 10 years ago would consume as much energy while putting out far less light. It's not a crazy amount of energy, standard LED lights just use so little energy that it's hardly worth measuring.
The poor CRI is really a dealbreaker for me. What I've done for my DIY "ghetto" photography lighting is I mixed 4 led strips of 2 temperatures from 2 different manufacturers. Much better, but still poor, to be frank.
They are fantastic. I have several more of the longer fluorescent replacements in my wood shop. More light is magnificently better for energy and productivity in pretty much all environments.
I would still prefer skylights to bulbs, but these are a good solution for dark rooms.
CRI is the real key. A lot of manufacturers have cut back on quality in the war over pricing. Philips had the very best consumer LEDs then started pushing their “SlimStyle” garbage with a CRI of barely 75. Amazon is littered with products advertising CRI “over 90” but in reality are probably barely breaking 80.
I don’t know about physiologically but perceptually it feels dimmer and drearier. The room feels gloomy although there is certainly sufficient “quantity” of light. It’s almost like everything takes a few milliseconds longer to resolve.
That, of course, is apart from the actual being unable to see certain shades of color and the spectrum being skewed one way or the other.
CRI is useful, but it's not a perfect measurement. You can make an 80 CRI bulb that subjectively looks pretty good for many use cases, or a 90+ CRI bulb that looks bad. (e.g. with poor R9 measurements.)
For those like me who didn't know what CRI is, it stands for color rendering index, and appears to represent how well the colors of things appear when lit by a light source.
Unfortunately it’s relatively limited, there are only a small number of wavelengths which are measured, and you can game it by tuning the peaks of the bulb to match up with those points.
There are better measures, but almost no manufacturers use them. I think just having the output spectrum and eyeballing it will do the trick.
I bought some LEDs on Amazon and uploaded charts showing the wavelength distribution. The LEDs were awful and the charts made it very clear why. Amazon deleted my review and the item currently has 5 stars.
The best lights I have are some warm white LED strips from eBay. I glued them to the top of my workbench (it's a desk under some shelves basically) and it is a joy to work there. I measured them and they are pretty close to daylight in terms of CRI, something like 93 if I recall correctly.
The only thing that makes me unhappy is the current state of LED strip driving. I have a device that takes 120VAC and turns it into 12V for the light strips. It "interprets" the output of a triac dimmer in front of it to PWM the LEDs. Very wasteful and stupid, but there are no constant-current drivers that just let you use something to adjust the current output unless you build your own. (A friend of mine did just that; the lights are amazing.) PWM naturally causes the cheap capacitors in the DC/DC converter to make noise, so I pretty much never dim them.
Did the CRI for the LEDs you bought match that which was listed or did they even have a CRI stated? I'm willing to spend extra for high CRI but so much junk on Amazon outright lies about being UL listed, it wouldn't surprise me if they started lying about CRI once they realize it is a selling point.
Yeah, they claimed a CRI of 91 but it was closer to 70, I think. (Measured with ArgyllCMS and a Colormunki Photo.)
You could tell it was wrong just by looking. It wasn't a measurement that only appeared by looking at it with expensive equipment; you turned the lights on and instantly though "this is completely unusable". I only measured it to see how bad it was.
Many offices, mostly in places like Amsterdam, Paris etc. in art-deco building, take pride in the amount of natural light they're pumping in the office. With mirrors and sunroofs (with sails as shade) and a few plants, you can really give a beautiful, open air feeling to your office.
This, feels like crutches.
edit: there is something to be said about starting an hour earlier and finishing an hour earlier if the sunset is early. It may be a good idea to live with the natural rhythm of the earth rather than some clock on the wall.
When it gets dark by 3:30pm and there’s so much cloud cover it never gets past dusk, you’ll appreciate the crutches. Biggest downside to living in seattle atm.
You're going to be awake for 16 hours on the average day. We get 9 hours of daylight a day in New York in the winter, so some portion of that is going to be spent in darkness no matter how wonderful your windows are.
In the summer, things are much better; 16 hours of daylight. So you really can put yourself on a schedule where the appearance of light wakes you up and its disappearance puts you to sleep.
I have a one-person office with glass walls in a coworking space. I've been looking for a lighting option that could possibly go above or below my monitor. I like the bulbs in this article, but I would prefer something directional so that I don't disturb my neighbors. Any suggestions?
Note that it's 1/3 the lumens of my corn bulb, but the smaller angle means the lux may be about the same (or you might need more--I haven't tried these).
>The effect was huge: I became dramatically more productive between 3:30pm and whenever I turned off the light. Instead of having a strong urge to stop working whenever it got dark out, I was able to keep working my normal summer schedule, stopping just before dinner. I estimate the lamp bought me between half an hour and two hours a day, depending on how overcast it was.
Does anyone know if people really do become "dramatically more productive"? It should be something that could be tested...
I was thinking about getting this myself, too.
I looked at dozens of corn cob light bulbs on eBay and AliExpress and found none with a CRI of 90 Ra or better.
In Germany you can buy cheap 13W E27 LED light bulbs at Aldi every January with 95+Ra.
> The lamp flickers when other current-hungry appliances turn on
That should not happen. There is likely a problem somewhere in the electrical system. We used to have similar problems in our home, hired an electrician to help track it down... they gave our home a clean bill of health, but called the city... long story short, they found a problem in a transformer a couple blocks away from us. It had been impacting many homes, and they were shocked nobody had call it in as a problem before us. But apparently, everyone just thought, "Oh, flickers are normal when appliances kick on, right?"
Yes and no. Motors pull a much higher current when they're starting up than when they're running, so your wall socket voltage is going to dip when you start a motor. That said, it shouldn't dip enough to be particularly noticeable, and if it is then that can point to a problem in your power supply or wiring.
It might not be noticeable, or as noticeable, with a 150W incandescent bulb, which has thermal inertia in the filament. What's going on here is that these are fast LEDs.
On the flip side, mains-voltage LEDs generally have built-in power supplies which should lead to them actually showing less dimming during brief voltage dips.
Some mains-voltage LEDs in fact flicker at twice the mains frequency! This is visible when you turn your vision, or when something moving, like rotating fan blades, is illuminated.
The Phillips flood lights in the track lighting fixture in my kitchen are like this.
They contain some sort of very light-weight power supply to rectify the line voltage and adapt it to the LED, but there is no LC capacity in it to even smooth out the 120 Hz ripple.
There is no room in those bulbs for the electrolytics/inductors that would be required.
Ah, this does seem quite plausible--my local power utility doesn't seem super competent, and my landlord doesn't seem particularly excited about maintaining my house :)
Whenever the bathroom heat lamp (well, lamps - 2 x 275W, 240V) turns on, I clearly see the lights in whatever room I'm in dip for maybe 10ms.
This used to happen with the old incandescent lamps from years back, but still happens with the newer CCFL types too. Has never not happened.
Huh. Something to keep in mind, particularly for whenever I'm in an environment with access to competent management/engineering ;) (I just know if I tried bringing it up with the current landlord I'm almost certain I'd be authoritatively told "that's normal"...)
I usually eschew labels, preferring simply "sleep weirdo", but I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals. The result is that I'm often awake through the night. (This week I'm going to bed around 9:00 a.m.)
Even with that, I've noticed some pretty big productivity swings based on the season. Interestingly, this hit me very hard in moving from where I'm from (southern Texas) to Michigan (for college) and then to Berlin (for the last 14 years). Right now, in Berlin, which is approximately as far north as Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, North America's northernmost large city, the sun sets before 4:00 p.m.
I usually try to spend a month of winter closer to the equator to keep my productivity levels and spirits up.
Between the seasonal adjustment (where the sunset time swings by a full 7 hours in Berlin) and my sleep weirdo-ness, I've also come to love me some artificial-sun-level lighting.
I tend towards 400-500 watt halogen bulbs. I have an up-firing light of approximately that wattage in every room of my home.
A question for other folks that compensate sunlight with artificial lighting:
Do LEDs really work for you? I'm a wanna-be hippie, and I'd love to use energy efficient bulbs and have tried every generation of them, but the light just doesn't do it for me. I keep going back to halogen as the sweet-spot between black-body radiation and energy efficiency. I can immediately spot the difference between an LED or CFL and incandescent bulb. I've had some success in mixing them in about 50/50 ratios. They've already been banned for sale in the EU, but I have a stockpile that will last me a decade in a pinch. Does anyone else struggle with the light quality from modern lighting?
Have you tried buying higher CRI LEDs? Halogens have very good color rendering compared to typical LEDs (100 vs ~80 for typical LEDs), but you can buy specialty bulbs with closer-to-natural spectra. I haven't dug much into off the shelf options, but one of my coworkers did and got excited about these lights: https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/high-cri-led-lights/p...
Hmm, that's sounds interesting and is at least an avenue to chase down. Sadly, next to my stockpile of halogen bulbs, I also basically have a lifetime supply of LEDs and CFLs that didn't pass muster. Maybe someday I'll have a really big garage that needs lighting. ;-)
The specific bulbs you linked to have a crazy high lumen rating, which appeals to me despite their high price.
I have noticed that name brand (and pricier) LEDs tend to do better for me. Some of the ones from e.g. Phillips and Osram put out a different quality of light (though it's still not up there with incandescents for me).
Thanks, that's interesting -- I'll have to buy one of their bulbs to compare to my other LED bulbs.
Looks like the lowest cost might be the 100W COB LED ... It would need a bunch of supporting equipment but it might be possible to do it for around $2 per watt.
Edit: I guess the normal bulbs and the led tubes could also come in around $2/watt and they can take mains power so that might be an easier but physically larger route.
Their standard socket bulb prices aren't bad (about $15 if you get a 6-pack), and they do produce bulbs for the slightly different European sockets, but shipping to Europe is about $40 (plus I'd then have to deal with picking them up at the customs office, which is always a multi-hour ordeal). But assuming I haven't found something decent before I'm next in the US in March, I'll pick some up then.
I absolutely hate LEDs. I don't know why, but I just hate them. Especially the white ones.
The yellower are similar to a mid summer day and I can cope with them, but there's always this feeling of something being off. I guess it's connected to us humans being used to non-sun light being (similar to) a fire - mainly consisting of yellow/orange tones.
Also, I don't exactly remember from where I read this, but when a (town) changed the street lights to LED's, a lot of people started having sleep problems, and it supposedly was connected to the blue light emmiting properties of (lower quality?) LEDs.
Yeah, I get the impression there's a massive difference in quality between cheap and good LEDs, and it's not always easy to tell which is which. In theory, when done right, LEDs can have a perfect spectrum with no flicker. But many manufacturers cut corners.
> I absolutely hate LEDs. I don't know why, but...
I'm really interested in the why. Most people don't seem to care. My in-laws have CFLs in their living room that just feel horrible to me, but they're none the wiser. I'm very curious as to what it is in the light spectrum that seems to matter to some (small) class of people, myself, and it sounds like you, included.
The word for "fire-like" light, used in my original comment, is "black-body radiation". Stars, fire and incandescent bulbs put out a similarly shaped spectrum.
A few years ago there were scientists working on a black-body (i.e. incandescent) light bulb that reflected infrared emission back to heat the filament and re-emit as visible light making for a theoretically efficient incandescent bulb. I check every year or so to see if the research has been commercialized, but have always been disappointed:
Edit: Another point on the blueness of LEDs is that they seem to amplify macular degeneration, which has made my grandmother mostly blind, and I know based on gene sequencing that I have a more than 50% chance of developing. While most of my rejection of LEDs is based on them not looking nice to me, I am also worried about hurrying the onset of blindness in old age for persons like myself who carry the genes for macular degeneration:
Well, fire does not shine by black-body radiation. Lamps try to emulate a black-body because that's what color standards dictate and labs test against, but fire has a very bad color resolution. (By the way, daylight isn't also like black-body radiation, but it's much closer than fire.)
Personally, flickering makes me ill. I am used enough to 120Hz to survive it, but any other frequency is bad. Also, the 6400K LEDs look way too blue, much bluer than the Sun. That may be because I have a relatively rare kind of color blindness.
huh that's really interesting about fire's emission spectrum!
regarding 6400k - even assuming the sun's spectrum matched the black body spectrum of its surface temperature, its surface temperature is closer to 5770k. but even taking that into account, its spectrum doesn't quite match 5770k in space - and the atmosphere changes it even further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_spectrum_en.svg
I really don't know how much of that change us humans can perceive, but my thinking is that 5000k is probably closer to the center, at least. it might be more of a saturated color, though, since the spectrum is more pointed vs the very flat but spikey spectrum in that plot.
> I'm really interested in the why. Most people don't seem to care. My in-laws have CFLs in their living room that just feel horrible to me, but they're none the wiser.
My first suspicion would be the spectrum of light emitted, which is mostly reflected in the CRI [1].
CFLs in particular "cheat" by having a couple really strong peaks of very specific wavelengths that to your eyes (or reflecting off a white surface) look like the right color, but when reflecting off anything they have reproduce colors inaccurately -- it's beyond my ability to explain this in detail, but you can see this in some spectrum charts [2].
LEDs vary greatly in this respect, so if you're concerned, you should really be paying close attention to the CRI (and note, as CRI goes up, so does cost).
psa: you can get this thing, which isn't the most precise ever, but lets you see this spectral information about lights for cheap: https://www.amazon.com/EISCO-Premium-Quantitative-Spectrosco... - I got one and WHEW CFLs' band lines are really obvious. Also, I feel kind of tickled that I saw the band gap on LED lights before seeing a description of what it is in the source for the spectrum plots in this article (the source being https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:White_LED.png ).
I'm a bit miffed it seems so hard to find lights that don't have this problem, though. maybe we can improve it by getting the word out that these cheap little diffraction devices can give you a pretty good approximate reading of the smoothness of the spectrum of a light source. Hmm, I just realized I have yet to take this to home depot...
I'm really curious about those MIT incandescent bulbs. If they worked well and haven't been brought to market, it's possible that contacting the people involved in creating them could have good results in making them happen. Perhaps they could be convinced to prioritize it if a case can be made that it can have a significant positive impact on the world?
I've recently got amber ones, at around 2000k and they are such a pleasure. Many of them look like classic incandescent bulb too, imitating wires in normal bulb.
Possibly due to the lights being driven from AC power making them pulse. You gotta find ones with big enough caps that they don't flicker, or buy some grow LEDs and a decent DC driver to emulate the sun.
I think it's the lack of heat (AKA infrared light) also reaching your body, which, when receiving bright visible light, is evolutionarily wired to expect heat coming from that same light source (e.g. the sun). Feels off for you to be cold and for it to be super bright.
I'm currently experimenting with 'emulating outdoors' in my office environment for health and productivity, and so far I've started with an 8,000 lux fanless corn LED (bought off Amazon) hanging from the wall and it's brilliant. I immediately feel 'happier' when I turn it on in the morning, every single time, but after a while, I agree, something feels off. I feel 'cold', temperature-wise.
I have read (no source for now, just from memory) that having bright white light indoors (e.g. fluorescent) without the presence of other light spectrum (including possibly natural UV) can actually increase cortisol.
So I think that more than just visible light is needed to complete the picture. Careful, low enough levels of UV and infrared that doesn't point directly at you but more 'above' you like the sun itself, may be the optimum to get some benefits but not cause dangerous skin or eye problems.
Same experience here. I film all the led bulbs I purchase in 240fps to see if they flicker at 60Hz. I discovered that Philips bulbs NEVER flicker. Occasionally I stumble upon other cheaper brands that don't flicker, but there is never any guarantee. I might buy 2 batches 6 months apart of bulbs from the same model from the same third party seller on Amazon, and they slightly changed the product (updated packaging and markings on the bulb) and one batch doesn't flicker whereas the other does... So I end up nowadays just buying Philips.
The Edison style are often like that. They use four led elements configured as a full wave bridge rectifier but because the diodes are themelves the load ther is no place to put the lowpass and so you get 120.
My experience is that daylight-blue (5000K–6500K) LEDs or fluorescents feel unnatural unless they are quite bright; something in the animal part of my brain worries that the sun is broken. Low CRI bulbs also feel off, which makes intuitive sense I suppose.
I've found that high CRI warm white (2700K) bulbs are the way to go for me.
A lot of the LED bulbs out there are poor quality, they have bad CRI and they flicker. I’d be interested to know if you find high CRI LEDs better, especially warmer ones.
I kept seeing the following problem with several different LED lights we were installing until I found one that was better:
Take your phone and take a video of the lights when on (normal framerate should be enough, try slow-motion for further investing). Most lights I got from the local hardware store were flickering quite visibly. And I'm pretty sure it's a design insufficiency of the adaptor electronics attached to it, not the LEDs themselves. If I were to guess I'd say most of them probably go the simple path of cutting off the negative half of the AC cycle and feeding the rest directly, without a decent low-pass filter to the LEDs.
What worked reasonably well for me, was getting a normal DC power supply and a few LED strips (with fairly dense and higher power LEDs) and installed that in a room. That light feels pretty satisfying to me.
All that being said, I don't like anything even remotely close to daylight level ambience when I am working on a computer screen; the custom lighting I set up is for other living areas.
All of them suck (objectively and subjectively) compared to full spectrum lamps.
> Does anyone else struggle with the light quality from modern lighting?
Besides poor light quality, another issue are dimmable LED lights which are often just PWM'd at a couple hundred Hz. This is a migraine trigger for me.
> Berlin, which is approximately as far north as Alberta, Canada, North America's northernmost large city
Presumably you mean the city of Edmonton. Alberta is about twice the size of Germany. ;)
> Do LEDs really work for you?
Mostly, yes. It's easy to buy halogens that all have pretty much the same good quality of light. LEDs you need balance CRI, R9, dimming quality, flickering, etc., but I've found LEDs that work for most of my use cases.
They work fine for me, while i'm considering myself sensitive to all sorts of flickering, or "strange" colors.
Don't be afraid of the "professional", they aren't much more expensive, 8 to 9€ per piece instead of something like 4 to 6€ for the others. They make a warm light but are too bright to directly look into, even the candlelike things at only 2 Watts. I bought the first ones out of frustrations with broken CFLs maybe three to four years ago (not a single CFL lasted over a year!), their warmup times, noise, and such, as a test. Now the only other light i have is some flexible/movable Halogen spot light, which i rarely use. Anything else is that stuff from the links. It just works for me, while even saving some energy. So far no defects. Instant on. No noise. No flickering for me. They are commonly available. I got mine at the Bauhaus. Test one or two and see for yourself. Though you won't get a single thing with 500 Watts. They max out at 75W equivalent while using 8Watts. So you'd need many of them.
"I keep going back to halogen as the sweet-spot between black-body radiation and energy efficiency."
Permies put out an article arguing for incandescent if your goal is light AND warmth: From https://richsoil.com/electric-heat.jsp - "This last one was the most important. A standard incandescent light bulb heats something to the point that it glows white hot. So I used this to heat myself and it doubled as a light source. And, I should point out that in a few months this light bulb will be banned by the US government. It is already banned in many countries. The comedy is that it is being banned to save energy. And yet, I think people can save far more energy by keeping it."
But incandescent light bulbs are a terrible heat source from an efficiency perspective. You're losing an incredible amount from the power plant, to the transmission, and pretty much everything else. Once it arrives, yes, the energy gets converted nearly 100% to heat eventually, mostly in your proximity. But a heat pump or even gas heating is far more efficient if the goal is to get heat.
If you read the article, the author is focusing on the scenario heating a person while sitting at their desk, not the entire room.
In those cases you could argue the methods he prescribes are more efficient, though not practical for times where you want to heat up a whole room or home.
Yeah, love that article. I'm slowly building a large foldaway 'kotatsu' coffee table using a mixture of ikea (ovraryd) and amazon/ebay parts (foldaway hairpin legs, centerpost, kotatsu heater).
> I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals.
This is a disorder now? I thought that's just how humans worked. It's how I work, anyway - if nothing else (like work, or children waking up at 5:30am) forces me to get up at a set time, I'll slowly cycle through until I'm going to bed at sun-up and waking up at 3pm.
I identify with the parent, and I've always been fine with "jet lag" to the point where I often don't even notice it or it only lasts until I go to bed the first night.
(IE; Sweden->Los Angeles, the inverse is harder but not as hard as most people seem to have it, it knocks some colleagues out for an entire week)
A week? Yeah I'm scragged for a day if I'm losing hours on a flight (although this is exacerbated by the fact that if I'm flying east I'm usually going from my 'starts around 9ish' desk job to 'be on site by 6am' minesite commissioning, so I'm effectively waking up at 2am when I'm used to waking up at 8:30am) but after that I'm fine.
The most cited paper on this is "Stability, Precision, and Near-24-Hour Period of the Human Circadian Pacemaker" (Czeisler, et al., 1999), which found that their 24 subjects between ages 13 and 65 had a mean circadian rhythm of 24 hours 10 minutes with a standard deviation of 8 minutes. Earlier studies were affected by artificial light lengthening cycles. Non-24 sleep-wake disorder in sighted people is not researched well enough to have accurate rates: there are only about a hundred cases in the existing studies and the disorder is not well known and probably underdiagnosed.
Once for a couple of weeks I worked and slept as I felt like it. I ended up doing ~30h days. It was the best I’ve ever felt while being quite productive.
Unfortunately it’s not an option to do that long term.
I think there have been studies where people in sleep labs without any natural light, clocks or other cues mostly tended toward ~25-hour days. The "disorder" part is when you can't help but do this, despite having access to all those cues and despite all efforts to the contrary.
I'm going through this currently. It doesn't help that my inspiration for work can sometimes make me work through the night, which 'messes up' the following day. I'm my own boss, so can do this without repercussions, but I sometimes think I'd be more productive if I stuck to a more regimented sleep schedule.
I did have a normal-ish sleep schedule when I had my job in finance, but I remember feeling exhausted all the time, especially weekday mornings.
I certainly feel healthier now, just sleeping when I'm tired. On occasion this can mean missing a bunch of daylight. Not sure if that's actually all that healthy though...
It sounds like we're similar. My personal, entirely unscientific self-diagnosis is that I have a well-defined circadian rhythm like most people, but it's easier for me to override by obsessive interest than for most people. Even sans coffee (which I'm pretty careful about as I near 40), if I'm really interested in something, I can work on it in a block of time up to and over 24 hours. Naturally that futzes with my sleep. My "tired-impulse" is relatively weak compared to my "this is exciting" or "people are waiting on this" impulse.
Before I ran a company (about 1/3 of my career), I mostly managed to hold things down on a "normal" schedule, but I was always tired and frequently had performance reviews where the only complaint was my tardiness.
There are some interesting data points: while camping (which I do a lot of -- several weeks per year), I do tend to sync up with the sun, even though in northern Europe that means waking up before 5:00 a.m. There's also limited screen time. (Though I did work from tent on a remote beach in Crete for a month this year.)
I picked up some melatonin tablets in my wife's home country (where it doesn't require a prescription), and will experiment with that in the near future for I-really-need-to-sleep-now times, but as much as my sleep is weird, it's so intertwined with my personality now that I'm hesitant to medicate it away even given the chance.
You're probably never going to see this so I'll keep it short. I just want to say that your disorder might be due to a circadian rhythm disruption. Instead of just focusing on light, you should also focus on darkness. Try not to look at any unnatural light after sundown.
If you want to cheat for convenience, they make red glasses that block all blue and green light which can interrupt your melatonin. You want to find red glasses that have barriers on the side to prevent the light from coming through from the sides. They sell 2 different kinds on Amazon. I found the effect to be very profound. You get tired quickly and when you fall asleep, you feel like you're in a coma and wake up refreshed. Unnatural light after sundown really does interrupt your sleep cycle.
I have this disorder as well, it started when I was 11 or 12. I've tried every trick that sleep doctors recommend (literally, everything) but nothing works. The only way I was able to maintain a 24-hour sleep cycle though school was to drink coffee every morning and take sleep medication regularly (from the age of 12). That was enough to make my sleep cycle 24 hours, but it didn't improve my sleep quality, so I spent most of school in a significantly sleep deprived state (only getting 3-5 hours of sleep a night). That's a pretty miserable state to live in for an extended period of time.
When I started living on my own and I was free to choose my own schedule, I decided to stop "forcing" myself onto a schedule that my body didn't agree with and instead let my sleep schedule naturally align with my circadian rhythms. It took about a month to get adjusted, but I remember waking up one morning and feeling like I had got my first full night's sleep in my entire life - it was an amazing feeling!
Since then I've been living on a ~ 24h 50m sleep cycle and I sleep like a baby (8 - 9 hrs) every night. Interestingly enough, I've discovered that I'm actually a morning person, when I used to think I was a night owl. I'm very grateful that I have the freedom to choose my own schedule (I'm a remote-only contractor), I dread ever having to go back to a 24h sleep cycle.
I haven't noticed much change in how I feel with seasons (I live in southern Ontario, Canada), but there's a big difference in my energy level depending on how much light I get in the morning (my mornings, not Earth mornings). If I don't get a good amount of bright light in the morning I feel sluggish and tired all day, regardless of how much sleep I got. If the sun's up when I wake up, I go for a run or walk every morning; otherwise I have about five 10,000 lux LED lights around my apartment that I turn on all morning (I have two right next to my desk in my peripheral vision, just like the person in the article). The LEDs are pretty weak, but they're enough if they're a few feet away from me. I start turning off all the lights and closing all the blinds in my apartment about 4 hours before bed or else it'll keep me up.
I would be very interested in reading more research about the cause of Non-24 Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder in sighted people; as far as I'm aware there's very little research on the matter. I didn't even know it existed until last year, I expect some more research and awareness could be very helpful to people in the same boat.
What does it mean to be on a "24h 50m" sleep cycle? Does your sleep time progressively become later until you're nocturnal, then continue looping round until it returns to a "normal" night's sleep?
Exactly. 24h 50m is the average I calculated after tracking my sleep for over a year. On average, the time that I wake up and go to sleep gets later by 50 minutes each day relative to a 24 hour day.
I'm currently waking up around 2am local time. In two weeks, I'll be waking up around noon.
If I lived on Mars, where the day length is 24h 37m, I would feel right at home (aside from the lack of breathable air).
Could you please briefly explain the way you cam calculate your cycle based on average time sleeping? I have to get up using alarms at times that are not related to how my body is feeling about waking up, so I don't see how tracking that would help.
I tend to start sleep later and later until I reach some dynamic equilibrium between sleep deprivation due to fixed wake up times and the tendency to delay sleep onset.
I almost never use an alarm anymore - there's no need to, my body knows exactly when to wake up because of my circadian rhythms (that's the way humans were supposed to work after all - we didn't evolve to use alarm clocks). Of course, the time my body "knows" to wake up is almost an hour later than it should, and that's the whole problem.
The way I calculated the length of my circadian rhythm cycle wasn't by tracking the duration of my sleep, it was by tracking the exact time I naturally woke up every day. I then calculated the difference in the time I woke up each day (the daily "drift" in my sleep cycle). The median of those "drift" values turned out to be around 50 minutes, which means my sleep cycle is 24h 50m on average.
It might seem like not using an alarm clock would bias those measurements, but that's actually not the case. Even assuming the fact that I don't use an alarm clock makes me sleep in (it doesn't, but for the sake of argument), that would only effect the average time that I wake up every day, not the average drift in my sleep cycle. There are a number of other biases that would have to be accounted for if this was an actual study, but for my purposes that's accurate enough.
In reality, everybody has a different natural circadian rhythm cycle. If that cycle is close enough to 24h, then you'll have a "normal" sleep cycle. If it's long enough to cause insomnia / delayed sleep onset but your body can still "compensate" (that "compensation" mechanism is called entrainment in chronobiology), then that's called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (I'm not a doctor, but that sounds like what you're describing). If your natural circadian rhythm cycle is so long that your body isn't capable of "compensating" to a 24h cycle, then that's called Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder. Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome is far more common than Non-24.
As for this point:
> I have to get up using alarms at times that are not related to how my body is feeling about waking up, so I don't see how tracking that would help.
I'm afraid tracking it didn't really help me at all - I simply tracked it because I was curious. My "solution" was simply to let my body do it's thing, but that's not an option for most people who have fixed work schedules or other commitments every day.
Are you familiar with Piotr Wozniak's writings on sleep? I think you might find them interesting https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Science_of_sleep. DSPS is pretty common and fairly natural considering how we've diverged in habits from our ancestors.
Any recommendations for spotlight table lamp in the office ? Looking for something when studying or working with room lights off and have only table lamp on for focus.
Kind of depends if you want something with integrated LED, something where you can screw in your own bulb, controls for dimming, what type of bulb, etc.
> Other than “we’ve been doing it for a while,” there seems to be no reason to expect that being in a 100x dimmer environment all day wouldn’t be awful. Indoor darkness seems to be one of those things that we don’t question only because it’s been that way forever.
An interesting question is: what average light levels existed in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness for humans, given the types of things our ancestors spent their days doing?
Consider: many humans were savannah persistence-hunters; but many humans were also jungle and arboreal-forest gatherers. And either way, we probably liked to find trees to climb and use as protection, when we could (as chimps do.)
So, given that, are human brains calibrated for "sun-baked African plains" daytime brightness, or "under a forest canopy" daytime brightness, or somewhere in between?
It could be different for everyone. My ancestors likely grew up in dense equatorial jungles and caves, not plains. A lot of my family members perform much better in dim light. My optimal seems to be 2-7 PM on a rainy day.
I'm not sure about the genetics of it (none of my family members seem to agree with me), but I also perform computer tasks far better in a dim light. A friend of me, who is also a night-owl, has the theory that when we get exposed to daylight, our cavemen heritage's natural reaction is to feel like going hunting/food gathering. While I don't buy the argument verbatim, I feel more like doing outdoor/physical activities on sunny days.
I've been wondering the same about ‘normal’ levels of activity. Pretty sure most of us are horribly motion-deprived by the standards of hunters or gatherers. But then again, presumably someone also was staying behind at home, and I don't remember any folk wisdom saying housekeepers are all dystrophic.
I'm planning to move to northern Alaska in a few years, so this information is very welcome.
I know I will need a setup against S.A.D. because it's very real up there.
If I get 4 of the 120 watt fanless bulbs, the daily cost of the bulbs and running them 8 hrs/day (assuming 30,000 lifespan) would cost only ~$0.29/day. That's an easy choice against SAD.
There are a bunch of calculations about this in Dercuano, in particular based on indoor-growing setups, but with a chair in them instead of a plant pot. It turns out that fluorescent tubes or especially halogen bulbs are cheaper than LEDs, and at the small scale of a desk and chair, the extra energy is affordable.
One big problem for hackers is that very few screens are readable even in 10klux, let alone 100klux direct sunlight (although that has the disadvantage of burning you).
I've been positively impressed with the readability of OLPC XOs in sunlight, which I think are what you're talking about. It's too bad they weren't willing to consider a capitalist rather than communist model for making them available; I think they would have been popular. I think there are also color transflective displays but I've only seen them in photos.
E-ink displays are even better than the XO, and machines with them are much more easily available, but most of them only come in the surveillance-capitalist hood-welded-shut model. They use orders of magnitude less energy than transflective LCDs for some usage patterns, but refresh slowly.
The only way they would sell you an XO was if you were going to give one to every kid in the country as part of a centrally planned education policy. While this could have been very effective, there's no denying that it's structurally much more Lenin or Castro than Pinochet, Eisenhower, or even Yew. If that's not obvious to you, it says more about your knowledge of political ideas than about my mental health; perhaps you only know “communist” as a pejorative due to US jingoism?
A capitalist approach to the problem would have stopped them from failing as completely as they did but also would have eliminated the possibility of the far-reaching transformation of education they were seeking to impose.
I wonder if it would be possible to write an app that could do it using the camera in a smart phone? The idea is that you would take some photos of some reference objects of known color under sunlight, and then take photos of those same objects under the lighting you are testing, and then figure out from the differences in the photos what the CRI must be.
The reference objects could be well known, easy to obtain household items, like a Pepsi can, a plastic bottle of Tide detergent, or box of Arm & Hammer baking soda. If the app included a reasonably good sized database of such items, there would be a good chance an average user would have a suitable set of color references already on hand.
I'm afraid that phone camera sensors are filtered to R/G/B, so a strong monochromatic orange, for example, may end up under-represented or even absent in the captured image, and will likely be hard to distinguish from an overlap between red and green.
Maybe modern image processing techniques can figure it out, but this seems like a huge problem to me.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadi wonder if this has similar problems
https://www.benkuhn.net/img/lux/ledspec.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffuse_sky_radiation#/media/F...
If you look at 460-470 nm where the spike is in the LED spectrum, it's much lower in the blue sky spectrum.
I think the concern is something about the relative amounts of blue light. Not sure what exactly but something like, the human perception of brightness and therefore the self protection of the eye is calibrated for natural light, so the pupil contraction, looking away, etc, is not done correctly in with that unnatural distribution. Anyway I don't know if that's a real effect, but that's what people (should) mean when they're talking about "too much blue".
From https://meaningness.com/metablog/sad-light-lumens : "The clinical studies were done with 10,000 lux provided by a bank of fluorescent tubes in a box that directed most of the light forward. Very roughly, if you are a couple feet from a box like that, 1 lumen produces 1 lux." It'd be interesting to see studies that have these lighting setups but don't involve staring towards them.
The setup that I'm happy enough with: a set of LIFX bulbs in normal light fixtures. They seem to put out more lumens (1100 lumens) than other color-changing led bulbs. If you don't want 'smart' lighting but still want the ability to change color temperature, Philips makes "SceneSwitch" lights (800 lumens) that will cycle color temperature based on turning on/off.
Note that there is a whole snake oil thing going on with blue light these days. Some of what we see about this stuff might be coming out of that particular industry.
But it will offset your other heat sources.
If you live alone, you can treat it like a room heater and lower the temperature for the rest of your home.
Since the bulb is radiating heat some degree of heat, you may be able to keep the temperature of the room you’re in lower without feeling cooler.
The fan is a bummer though.
The moment we can buy eg a 3ft by 1ft panel that we can just mount on a wall and feels like an actual sunlit window for a few thousands dollars or so, interior design is likely going to get radically different.
(And that’s not to mention the sci-fi dream of a screen that can simulate a window looking out on any landscape, but these are probably way further out)
Apparently it uses some nanoscale material that produces (mimics?) Rayleigh scattering.
https://www.vox.com/2015/2/18/8060673/skylight-artificial-li...
It's quite ingenious, the aerogel consists of silica nanoparticles with a size distribution smaller than the wavelength of the light, leading to Rayleigh scattering to dominate. The non-uniformity of the aerogel structure is what gives it the more nuanced lighting, it lets a bit of yellow light, a bit of this and that, making a non-monochromatic source that resembles sunlight very well.
For those unfamiliar, the panel simulates Rayleigh scattering to give the appearance of a blue sky, with a simulated sun and close to incandescent color rendering. Too bad the price tag still seems to be in the tens of thousands though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4
One of my systems may have been a bit over powered and over used, as I developed what a doctor friend later diagnosed as "light induced hypomania", which was quite an experience.
Experiment at your own risk.
I would note that light-therapy lamps for SAD have clear instructions to not sit in front of them for more than an hour-or-so at a time. Your body really does just go on producing more dopamine as long as you're sitting there.
In that same vein, I've wondered how to simulate outdoor conditions inside, especially something approximating more light, in part because I think a family-member is mildly susceptible to seasonal affective disorder. I can't wait to see what the author has to say.
- a correlation between being outdoors and stood up and moving
- colder temperature (but I guess in the summer when it’s not stifling it can be preferable to be out so maybe this is wrong)
- some psychological/placebo effect
- less CO2 in the air. I can’t really put any numbers to this hypothesis as I don’t have a meter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nh_vxpycEA
(or the studies themselves https://www.gwern.net/docs/co2/2015-stafford.pdf and others)
I.e. I think air quality is likely a big factor. When it's windy and I get good airflow through my room it doesn't feel as different from outside. It's probably not only CO2, but also dust, VOCs, funghi, microorganisms, etc.
comparing lighting to the consumption of a fridge, which is one of the most energy intensive appliances in an average house, is kinda ridiculous. Its like saying your lawn mower energy use is just fine because it consumes the same as your SUV.
Tl;dr: 2kwh per day for a light is a LOT. A standard led light would consume about 5% of that.
That it costs a lot more than a regular light is neither here nor there (and I think anyone reading would have already guessed that).
https://www.waveformlighting.com/high-cri-led-strip-lights
They are fantastic. I have several more of the longer fluorescent replacements in my wood shop. More light is magnificently better for energy and productivity in pretty much all environments.
I would still prefer skylights to bulbs, but these are a good solution for dark rooms.
There are a lot of Chinese cheap LED fixtures available on Amazon and no one seems to care about the CRI - it defines how colors appear in your room.
That, of course, is apart from the actual being unable to see certain shades of color and the spectrum being skewed one way or the other.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-CRI_LED_lighting
There are better measures, but almost no manufacturers use them. I think just having the output spectrum and eyeballing it will do the trick.
The best lights I have are some warm white LED strips from eBay. I glued them to the top of my workbench (it's a desk under some shelves basically) and it is a joy to work there. I measured them and they are pretty close to daylight in terms of CRI, something like 93 if I recall correctly.
The only thing that makes me unhappy is the current state of LED strip driving. I have a device that takes 120VAC and turns it into 12V for the light strips. It "interprets" the output of a triac dimmer in front of it to PWM the LEDs. Very wasteful and stupid, but there are no constant-current drivers that just let you use something to adjust the current output unless you build your own. (A friend of mine did just that; the lights are amazing.) PWM naturally causes the cheap capacitors in the DC/DC converter to make noise, so I pretty much never dim them.
You could tell it was wrong just by looking. It wasn't a measurement that only appeared by looking at it with expensive equipment; you turned the lights on and instantly though "this is completely unusable". I only measured it to see how bad it was.
This, feels like crutches.
edit: there is something to be said about starting an hour earlier and finishing an hour earlier if the sunset is early. It may be a good idea to live with the natural rhythm of the earth rather than some clock on the wall.
Compare the sunset times with London, Copenhagen, Oslo.
You had 1½ hours more daylight today than Copenhagen.
The Uyghurs are not complaining about that just now.
In the summer, things are much better; 16 hours of daylight. So you really can put yourself on a schedule where the appearance of light wakes you up and its disappearance puts you to sleep.
1) Concerns about eye damage.
2) Concerns about skin damage.
If you're willing to pay more for much better color rendering than mine, my coworker got excited about these: https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/high-cri-led-lights/p...
Note that it's 1/3 the lumens of my corn bulb, but the smaller angle means the lux may be about the same (or you might need more--I haven't tried these).
I've got bias light setups at both my home and office with bulbs behind my monitor shining at the wall.
>The effect was huge: I became dramatically more productive between 3:30pm and whenever I turned off the light. Instead of having a strong urge to stop working whenever it got dark out, I was able to keep working my normal summer schedule, stopping just before dinner. I estimate the lamp bought me between half an hour and two hours a day, depending on how overcast it was.
Does anyone know if people really do become "dramatically more productive"? It should be something that could be tested...
I also converted my mom's house from incandescent (she was a hold-out) to LEDs, and her electric bill went way, way down.
I found a better solution is a 1 to 7 bulb splitter with 7 150W equivalent bulbs for a total of about 15000 lumens.
https://www.amazon.com/8T8-Splitter-Standard-Converter-Comme...
I'd be curious trying a spotlight (something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Primelux-8-inch-14400-Lumens-Driving/...) that is farther away from me.
The parallel rays of a spotlight would probably look and feel more sun like compared to the radial rays of normal bulbs.
That should not happen. There is likely a problem somewhere in the electrical system. We used to have similar problems in our home, hired an electrician to help track it down... they gave our home a clean bill of health, but called the city... long story short, they found a problem in a transformer a couple blocks away from us. It had been impacting many homes, and they were shocked nobody had call it in as a problem before us. But apparently, everyone just thought, "Oh, flickers are normal when appliances kick on, right?"
The Phillips flood lights in the track lighting fixture in my kitchen are like this.
They contain some sort of very light-weight power supply to rectify the line voltage and adapt it to the LED, but there is no LC capacity in it to even smooth out the 120 Hz ripple.
There is no room in those bulbs for the electrolytics/inductors that would be required.
I have the exact same thing happen here.
Whenever the bathroom heat lamp (well, lamps - 2 x 275W, 240V) turns on, I clearly see the lights in whatever room I'm in dip for maybe 10ms.
This used to happen with the old incandescent lamps from years back, but still happens with the newer CCFL types too. Has never not happened.
Huh. Something to keep in mind, particularly for whenever I'm in an environment with access to competent management/engineering ;) (I just know if I tried bringing it up with the current landlord I'm almost certain I'd be authoritatively told "that's normal"...)
Even with that, I've noticed some pretty big productivity swings based on the season. Interestingly, this hit me very hard in moving from where I'm from (southern Texas) to Michigan (for college) and then to Berlin (for the last 14 years). Right now, in Berlin, which is approximately as far north as Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, North America's northernmost large city, the sun sets before 4:00 p.m.
I usually try to spend a month of winter closer to the equator to keep my productivity levels and spirits up.
Between the seasonal adjustment (where the sunset time swings by a full 7 hours in Berlin) and my sleep weirdo-ness, I've also come to love me some artificial-sun-level lighting.
I tend towards 400-500 watt halogen bulbs. I have an up-firing light of approximately that wattage in every room of my home.
A question for other folks that compensate sunlight with artificial lighting:
Do LEDs really work for you? I'm a wanna-be hippie, and I'd love to use energy efficient bulbs and have tried every generation of them, but the light just doesn't do it for me. I keep going back to halogen as the sweet-spot between black-body radiation and energy efficiency. I can immediately spot the difference between an LED or CFL and incandescent bulb. I've had some success in mixing them in about 50/50 ratios. They've already been banned for sale in the EU, but I have a stockpile that will last me a decade in a pinch. Does anyone else struggle with the light quality from modern lighting?
The specific bulbs you linked to have a crazy high lumen rating, which appeals to me despite their high price.
I have noticed that name brand (and pricier) LEDs tend to do better for me. Some of the ones from e.g. Phillips and Osram put out a different quality of light (though it's still not up there with incandescents for me).
https://www.waveformlighting.com/high-cri-led-strip-lights
Looks like the lowest cost might be the 100W COB LED ... It would need a bunch of supporting equipment but it might be possible to do it for around $2 per watt.
Edit: I guess the normal bulbs and the led tubes could also come in around $2/watt and they can take mains power so that might be an easier but physically larger route.
The yellower are similar to a mid summer day and I can cope with them, but there's always this feeling of something being off. I guess it's connected to us humans being used to non-sun light being (similar to) a fire - mainly consisting of yellow/orange tones.
Also, I don't exactly remember from where I read this, but when a (town) changed the street lights to LED's, a lot of people started having sleep problems, and it supposedly was connected to the blue light emmiting properties of (lower quality?) LEDs.
I'm really interested in the why. Most people don't seem to care. My in-laws have CFLs in their living room that just feel horrible to me, but they're none the wiser. I'm very curious as to what it is in the light spectrum that seems to matter to some (small) class of people, myself, and it sounds like you, included.
The word for "fire-like" light, used in my original comment, is "black-body radiation". Stars, fire and incandescent bulbs put out a similarly shaped spectrum.
A few years ago there were scientists working on a black-body (i.e. incandescent) light bulb that reflected infrared emission back to heat the filament and re-emit as visible light making for a theoretically efficient incandescent bulb. I check every year or so to see if the research has been commercialized, but have always been disappointed:
https://www.dezeen.com/2016/01/13/mit-energy-efficient-incan...
Edit: Another point on the blueness of LEDs is that they seem to amplify macular degeneration, which has made my grandmother mostly blind, and I know based on gene sequencing that I have a more than 50% chance of developing. While most of my rejection of LEDs is based on them not looking nice to me, I am also worried about hurrying the onset of blindness in old age for persons like myself who carry the genes for macular degeneration:
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/16/health/blue-light-led-hea...
Personally, flickering makes me ill. I am used enough to 120Hz to survive it, but any other frequency is bad. Also, the 6400K LEDs look way too blue, much bluer than the Sun. That may be because I have a relatively rare kind of color blindness.
Flame, not entirely; embers, yes.
regarding 6400k - even assuming the sun's spectrum matched the black body spectrum of its surface temperature, its surface temperature is closer to 5770k. but even taking that into account, its spectrum doesn't quite match 5770k in space - and the atmosphere changes it even further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_spectrum_en.svg
I really don't know how much of that change us humans can perceive, but my thinking is that 5000k is probably closer to the center, at least. it might be more of a saturated color, though, since the spectrum is more pointed vs the very flat but spikey spectrum in that plot.
My first suspicion would be the spectrum of light emitted, which is mostly reflected in the CRI [1].
CFLs in particular "cheat" by having a couple really strong peaks of very specific wavelengths that to your eyes (or reflecting off a white surface) look like the right color, but when reflecting off anything they have reproduce colors inaccurately -- it's beyond my ability to explain this in detail, but you can see this in some spectrum charts [2].
LEDs vary greatly in this respect, so if you're concerned, you should really be paying close attention to the CRI (and note, as CRI goes up, so does cost).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index
[2] https://www.ledsmaster.com/color-rendering-index-cri-versus-...
Another thing I hate is LEDs with such a sharp point source them make speckle patterns like a laser.
But I did find some good LEDs and I'm using them now, them seem as good as the CFLs they replaced. Had to return a bunch of bad ones though.
I'm a bit miffed it seems so hard to find lights that don't have this problem, though. maybe we can improve it by getting the word out that these cheap little diffraction devices can give you a pretty good approximate reading of the smoothness of the spectrum of a light source. Hmm, I just realized I have yet to take this to home depot...
I'm really curious about those MIT incandescent bulbs. If they worked well and haven't been brought to market, it's possible that contacting the people involved in creating them could have good results in making them happen. Perhaps they could be convinced to prioritize it if a case can be made that it can have a significant positive impact on the world?
I'm currently experimenting with 'emulating outdoors' in my office environment for health and productivity, and so far I've started with an 8,000 lux fanless corn LED (bought off Amazon) hanging from the wall and it's brilliant. I immediately feel 'happier' when I turn it on in the morning, every single time, but after a while, I agree, something feels off. I feel 'cold', temperature-wise.
I have read (no source for now, just from memory) that having bright white light indoors (e.g. fluorescent) without the presence of other light spectrum (including possibly natural UV) can actually increase cortisol.
So I think that more than just visible light is needed to complete the picture. Careful, low enough levels of UV and infrared that doesn't point directly at you but more 'above' you like the sun itself, may be the optimum to get some benefits but not cause dangerous skin or eye problems.
Phones are pretty bad too. Check out the Nexus 5x vs Pixel 3: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1f7-ChF4zFiisFdmEZVEz...
I found that Phillips non dimmable bulbs are the cheap and don't flicker.
I've found that high CRI warm white (2700K) bulbs are the way to go for me.
I have these at home, and I like them a lot: https://www.lowes.com/pd/GE-Relax-60-Watt-EQ-A19-Soft-White-... . (I bought them at Home Depot, but it looks like they no longer sell them.)
What worked reasonably well for me, was getting a normal DC power supply and a few LED strips (with fairly dense and higher power LEDs) and installed that in a room. That light feels pretty satisfying to me.
All that being said, I don't like anything even remotely close to daylight level ambience when I am working on a computer screen; the custom lighting I set up is for other living areas.
All of them suck (objectively and subjectively) compared to full spectrum lamps.
> Does anyone else struggle with the light quality from modern lighting?
Besides poor light quality, another issue are dimmable LED lights which are often just PWM'd at a couple hundred Hz. This is a migraine trigger for me.
Presumably you mean the city of Edmonton. Alberta is about twice the size of Germany. ;)
> Do LEDs really work for you?
Mostly, yes. It's easy to buy halogens that all have pretty much the same good quality of light. LEDs you need balance CRI, R9, dimming quality, flickering, etc., but I've found LEDs that work for most of my use cases.
[1] https://www.osram.de/ecat/Professional%20LED-Lampen%20mit%20...
[2] https://www.osram.com/ecat/Professional%20LED%20lamps%20with...
They work fine for me, while i'm considering myself sensitive to all sorts of flickering, or "strange" colors. Don't be afraid of the "professional", they aren't much more expensive, 8 to 9€ per piece instead of something like 4 to 6€ for the others. They make a warm light but are too bright to directly look into, even the candlelike things at only 2 Watts. I bought the first ones out of frustrations with broken CFLs maybe three to four years ago (not a single CFL lasted over a year!), their warmup times, noise, and such, as a test. Now the only other light i have is some flexible/movable Halogen spot light, which i rarely use. Anything else is that stuff from the links. It just works for me, while even saving some energy. So far no defects. Instant on. No noise. No flickering for me. They are commonly available. I got mine at the Bauhaus. Test one or two and see for yourself. Though you won't get a single thing with 500 Watts. They max out at 75W equivalent while using 8Watts. So you'd need many of them.
Permies put out an article arguing for incandescent if your goal is light AND warmth: From https://richsoil.com/electric-heat.jsp - "This last one was the most important. A standard incandescent light bulb heats something to the point that it glows white hot. So I used this to heat myself and it doubled as a light source. And, I should point out that in a few months this light bulb will be banned by the US government. It is already banned in many countries. The comedy is that it is being banned to save energy. And yet, I think people can save far more energy by keeping it."
I've owned it for 5 years and it's clogged only once (it happened in the first week of ownership) then never again.
And one time (in 5 years) I needed to flush it twice.
In those cases you could argue the methods he prescribes are more efficient, though not practical for times where you want to heat up a whole room or home.
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/02/heating-people-not-s...
This is a disorder now? I thought that's just how humans worked. It's how I work, anyway - if nothing else (like work, or children waking up at 5:30am) forces me to get up at a set time, I'll slowly cycle through until I'm going to bed at sun-up and waking up at 3pm.
(IE; Sweden->Los Angeles, the inverse is harder but not as hard as most people seem to have it, it knocks some colleagues out for an entire week)
Once for a couple of weeks I worked and slept as I felt like it. I ended up doing ~30h days. It was the best I’ve ever felt while being quite productive.
Unfortunately it’s not an option to do that long term.
I did have a normal-ish sleep schedule when I had my job in finance, but I remember feeling exhausted all the time, especially weekday mornings.
I certainly feel healthier now, just sleeping when I'm tired. On occasion this can mean missing a bunch of daylight. Not sure if that's actually all that healthy though...
Before I ran a company (about 1/3 of my career), I mostly managed to hold things down on a "normal" schedule, but I was always tired and frequently had performance reviews where the only complaint was my tardiness.
There are some interesting data points: while camping (which I do a lot of -- several weeks per year), I do tend to sync up with the sun, even though in northern Europe that means waking up before 5:00 a.m. There's also limited screen time. (Though I did work from tent on a remote beach in Crete for a month this year.)
I picked up some melatonin tablets in my wife's home country (where it doesn't require a prescription), and will experiment with that in the near future for I-really-need-to-sleep-now times, but as much as my sleep is weird, it's so intertwined with my personality now that I'm hesitant to medicate it away even given the chance.
If you want to cheat for convenience, they make red glasses that block all blue and green light which can interrupt your melatonin. You want to find red glasses that have barriers on the side to prevent the light from coming through from the sides. They sell 2 different kinds on Amazon. I found the effect to be very profound. You get tired quickly and when you fall asleep, you feel like you're in a coma and wake up refreshed. Unnatural light after sundown really does interrupt your sleep cycle.
When I started living on my own and I was free to choose my own schedule, I decided to stop "forcing" myself onto a schedule that my body didn't agree with and instead let my sleep schedule naturally align with my circadian rhythms. It took about a month to get adjusted, but I remember waking up one morning and feeling like I had got my first full night's sleep in my entire life - it was an amazing feeling!
Since then I've been living on a ~ 24h 50m sleep cycle and I sleep like a baby (8 - 9 hrs) every night. Interestingly enough, I've discovered that I'm actually a morning person, when I used to think I was a night owl. I'm very grateful that I have the freedom to choose my own schedule (I'm a remote-only contractor), I dread ever having to go back to a 24h sleep cycle.
I haven't noticed much change in how I feel with seasons (I live in southern Ontario, Canada), but there's a big difference in my energy level depending on how much light I get in the morning (my mornings, not Earth mornings). If I don't get a good amount of bright light in the morning I feel sluggish and tired all day, regardless of how much sleep I got. If the sun's up when I wake up, I go for a run or walk every morning; otherwise I have about five 10,000 lux LED lights around my apartment that I turn on all morning (I have two right next to my desk in my peripheral vision, just like the person in the article). The LEDs are pretty weak, but they're enough if they're a few feet away from me. I start turning off all the lights and closing all the blinds in my apartment about 4 hours before bed or else it'll keep me up.
I would be very interested in reading more research about the cause of Non-24 Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder in sighted people; as far as I'm aware there's very little research on the matter. I didn't even know it existed until last year, I expect some more research and awareness could be very helpful to people in the same boat.
I'm currently waking up around 2am local time. In two weeks, I'll be waking up around noon.
If I lived on Mars, where the day length is 24h 37m, I would feel right at home (aside from the lack of breathable air).
I tend to start sleep later and later until I reach some dynamic equilibrium between sleep deprivation due to fixed wake up times and the tendency to delay sleep onset.
The way I calculated the length of my circadian rhythm cycle wasn't by tracking the duration of my sleep, it was by tracking the exact time I naturally woke up every day. I then calculated the difference in the time I woke up each day (the daily "drift" in my sleep cycle). The median of those "drift" values turned out to be around 50 minutes, which means my sleep cycle is 24h 50m on average.
It might seem like not using an alarm clock would bias those measurements, but that's actually not the case. Even assuming the fact that I don't use an alarm clock makes me sleep in (it doesn't, but for the sake of argument), that would only effect the average time that I wake up every day, not the average drift in my sleep cycle. There are a number of other biases that would have to be accounted for if this was an actual study, but for my purposes that's accurate enough.
In reality, everybody has a different natural circadian rhythm cycle. If that cycle is close enough to 24h, then you'll have a "normal" sleep cycle. If it's long enough to cause insomnia / delayed sleep onset but your body can still "compensate" (that "compensation" mechanism is called entrainment in chronobiology), then that's called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (I'm not a doctor, but that sounds like what you're describing). If your natural circadian rhythm cycle is so long that your body isn't capable of "compensating" to a 24h cycle, then that's called Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder. Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome is far more common than Non-24.
As for this point:
> I have to get up using alarms at times that are not related to how my body is feeling about waking up, so I don't see how tracking that would help.
I'm afraid tracking it didn't really help me at all - I simply tracked it because I was curious. My "solution" was simply to let my body do it's thing, but that's not an option for most people who have fixed work schedules or other commitments every day.
Are those really 400-500 watt or just give light equivalent to 400-500 watts worth of incandescent light bulbs?
Personally I like the Ikea Forsa.
An interesting question is: what average light levels existed in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness for humans, given the types of things our ancestors spent their days doing?
Consider: many humans were savannah persistence-hunters; but many humans were also jungle and arboreal-forest gatherers. And either way, we probably liked to find trees to climb and use as protection, when we could (as chimps do.)
So, given that, are human brains calibrated for "sun-baked African plains" daytime brightness, or "under a forest canopy" daytime brightness, or somewhere in between?
I know I will need a setup against S.A.D. because it's very real up there.
If I get 4 of the 120 watt fanless bulbs, the daily cost of the bulbs and running them 8 hrs/day (assuming 30,000 lifespan) would cost only ~$0.29/day. That's an easy choice against SAD.
One big problem for hackers is that very few screens are readable even in 10klux, let alone 100klux direct sunlight (although that has the disadvantage of burning you).
Annoyingly I've still not seen one IRL. They go black and white, apparently, but are still 100% legible.
E-ink displays are even better than the XO, and machines with them are much more easily available, but most of them only come in the surveillance-capitalist hood-welded-shut model. They use orders of magnitude less energy than transflective LCDs for some usage patterns, but refresh slowly.
Not “neoliberal private-public partnership bull crap” but somehow “communist”? Lololol.
A capitalist approach to the problem would have stopped them from failing as completely as they did but also would have eliminated the possibility of the far-reaching transformation of education they were seeking to impose.
It seems like a simple enough problem with a prism and a monochrome CCD sensor, yet the cheapest device I can find is over a thousand dollars.
The reference objects could be well known, easy to obtain household items, like a Pepsi can, a plastic bottle of Tide detergent, or box of Arm & Hammer baking soda. If the app included a reasonably good sized database of such items, there would be a good chance an average user would have a suitable set of color references already on hand.
Maybe modern image processing techniques can figure it out, but this seems like a huge problem to me.