AvBrand Exploring Technology
Artificial Sunlight
8:46 AM, November 2nd, 2011
UPDATE: I've added another 8 bulbs and updated this article.
So it's that time of year where by 6:30pm, the sun has set and it's dark out. To make matters worse, next week, the clocks will fall back an hour, meaning the sun will set an hour earlier each day. So by 5pm, it will be pretty dark outside.
To try to make my place feel less depressing and to give myself lots of nice light, I build this "artificial sun" rig yesterday:
It's three 6-light bathroom fixtures, totaling 20 (that's twenty!) 1,600-lumen, 5000K compact fluorescent light bulbs. That means it provides 32,000 lumens of light!
It brightens up the whole room like crazy. Stay tuned, I'll let you know how it changes my mood / feelings / etc. In total, the whole rig only uses 460 watts of power, so it's not very expensive to run it (about 7 cents an hour).
Here you can see the difference in light levels, in the same spot, with the 'old' lights vs the new ones.
So it's that time of year where by 6:30pm, the sun has set and it's dark out. To make matters worse, next week, the clocks will fall back an hour, meaning the sun will set an hour earlier each day. So by 5pm, it will be pretty dark outside.
To try to make my place feel less depressing and to give myself lots of nice light, I build this "artificial sun" rig yesterday:
It's three 6-light bathroom fixtures, totaling 20 (that's twenty!) 1,600-lumen, 5000K compact fluorescent light bulbs. That means it provides 32,000 lumens of light!
It brightens up the whole room like crazy. Stay tuned, I'll let you know how it changes my mood / feelings / etc. In total, the whole rig only uses 460 watts of power, so it's not very expensive to run it (about 7 cents an hour).
Here you can see the difference in light levels, in the same spot, with the 'old' lights vs the new ones.