Our first foray into LED bulbs proved too dim: we went CFL…and hope to learn the equivalencies of these newfangled lighting devices.
WE have yet to grout the mural—we want a darker grout and have not yet gotten to Lowe’s, so we have not gotten the extenders we need for the plumbing of the sink and faucet, either, so the sink waits.
We have yet to install the decorative part of the shower curtain: we need, of all things, a pipe cutter to get the curtain rod the length we need. We have yet to put up the towel rods. But by golly, we got those mirrored triple-door cabinets up, and that expanse of mirror makes the bathroom brighter and makes it appear larger: no more cubbyhole.
You might be able to find a suitable grout for cheap, and more of your repair supplies too, if you have a ReStore shop in your area. I find a lot of good stuff there for my home improvement projects — I’m going there next week to look for a replacement front door.
LED lights are tricky. I bought a couple that I hoped to use for lighting a small office space, and discovered that they were barely enough to count as a night light! See if they tell you how many lumens they put out, relative to a conventional bulb. On the plus side, they will last almost forever; on the down side, they are currently bloody expensive, compared to CFLs or incandescents.
With LED bulbs, the best you’re going to get at the moment is a 40 watt bulb equivalent amount of light. The problem actually comes down to how to get rid of the heat the LEDs produce. While they’re much, much more efficient at producing light than incandescents, and somewhat more efficient than CFLs (meaning they produce less heat overall than both types of bulb), they produce all their heat at a pinpoint location in the base of the bulb, which is somewhere that’s pretty tough to remove heat from. If you drive the LEDs harder than they do in the 40W equivalent bulb, they’ll be brighter, but they’ll also overheat and die much more quickly than they should. If you were wondering what the funny metal prong things were on the LED bulb, they’re heat sinks. This also means that if you put an LED bulb in a recessed fixture, it can overheat and you’ll end up with much shorter bulb life than you expect.
Disclaimer: I work at an R&D lab that’s working on LED light bulbs. I don’t work on the project directly, but I’ve picked the researchers’ brains a fair amount because I want my super-efficient super-bright LEDs!
You want a super bright LED? Oh that’s easy. Just buy some modern consumer electronics. I had to replace my electric tooth brush recently and the power/recharge light is a bright green. Bright enough to illuminate a dark bedroom and not the kind of thing you want to have flashing while you’re trying to get to sleep. I’ve taken to dropping the inside of a toilet roll over it but even then you have to position it right to block the worst of it.
Or there’s my living room which at night is starting to look like Santa’s grotto. There’s a heckuva difference if you go down after 1am when most of the timers have knocked off and cut power to various devices.
We have one spare bedroom designated as the computer room, where all the servers for DH’s business and our personal computers reside. At night, we literally have a rainbow of various colored lights from the mouses, UPSes, standby lights on hard drives and monitors, etc. etc. It’s almost bright enough to read by.
In’trust’in’!
I use an 8 W LED bulb as a reading light in bed; it works well and doesn’t singe my ear. I have a little 2 W candelabra as a night-light ‘candle in my window’. But for lighting my rooms I use either CFL or straight FL lights, and always Natural Sunshine or 6500°K. It feels like outdoors, and I haven’t felt so much SAD as in years gone by. That’s important in a basement apartment. That’s my story, and I’m gonna stick to it. Plus it saves money.
WE’re great believers in 6500—and it grows plants.
I have one of those in my dining room. That’s the only light I normally use. It’s a combined diner/lounge and a 100w equivalent daylight CFL is enough for watching TV and browsing the web. When I want to read a book I have 300w equivalent CFLs above my head but (glancing around) most of my reading these days is done at work 🙂
Glad to hear the renovation is going so well.
There was an article in the New Scientist last year about the influence of light on the circadian cycle. It said that melatonin is much more sensitive to blue light (logical, as sunlight contains less of it).
It also compared the spectra of glowbulbs, CFLs and LED lights. Glowbulbs produce mostly yellow wavelengths, then red, and least blue. CFLs are mostly middling in all three wavelengths, and current* LED lights had a big spike in the blue wavelength, and only a little yellow and red, relatively.
This means that using LED lights in the evening (to read before bedtime, or soak a nice long time in the bath) destroys more of the melatonin circulating in your blood, which should be increasing to make you sleepy.
—
Melatonin is produced by the body, and gets destroyed when (sun)light falls on the bloodvessels in the back of your eyes, if I’ve understood the explanation correctly. This helps you wake up in the morning, and keeps the bodyclock-rythm from going out of sync with the earth’s rotation. There was an experiment (years ago) in which people stayed in a cave for a long time (weeks or months) without contact with external daily rythm signals; and their body-clocks natural rythms ended up closer to a 25 than 24 hour cycle.
This is also implicated in the trouble that some blind people have with sleeping.
—
Sorry – I got sidetracked. The point of this post was, that using LEDs at night can mean that it will take longer to fall asleep, as the body needs to produce enough melatonin to top up the circulating amount in the blood to the level needed to fall asleep.
So using CFLs instead of LEDs may be a much better choice, if one or both of you like(s) a long soak before bedtime and has/have trouble falling asleep sometimes.
I’ve heard that sitting close to a TV-screen or a computerscreen can have a similar effect. I don’t know the details about that, nor about the difference which the type of screen might make. I have noticed that when I’m working on my computer in the evening, I don’t get sleepy at the usual time; and it’s rather a cliché that computer-people often work late at night, so there might be some truth in it.
* The new LEDs that TheGelf’s lab (and others) are working on might not have this imbalance. I have absolutely no idea about the future developments, so please don’t take this as a general warning against alle LED lights for the future as well. It’s just that I hear quite a few people grumbling about trouble sleeping (I have trouble myself), and I see more and more people switching to LED for cosy roomlighting. Then I read this article, and I never heard about this aspect in the shops where they sell the lights… I just thought more people should know this.
It seems to me like a brilliant idea to use LEDs in the breakfast nook, but not so good as bedside reading lights, for people inclined to have trouble falling asleep.
From what I know about fluorescent and LED lighting, their output spectra will vary widely depending on the phosphor blend that’s in use.
Fluorescent lamps work by sparking a mercury vapor plasma inside the glass tube (or squiggle for CFLs), which emits in the UV. The inside of the glass tube is then coated with a variety of phosphors that absorb the UV, and then re-emit it as visible light of varying frequencies. The actual output spectrum depends on the particular coctail of phosphors. Tweaking that mixture is how they get “daylight” and “cool white” and all the other varieties of fluorescent lamps.
White light LED lightbulbs work similarly, except instead of converting UV to visible, they start with a blue LED and downconvert some of the blue to red and green, giving a final mix of blue, red, and green light that appears white. While you could emit white light directly from an LED, it’s no where near as energy efficient (yet, barring any new discoveries) as going for a high-intensity blue LED, and building the rest of the bulb off of it using phosphors. So the big spike in the blue wavelength makes sense, seeing as how the base light source is blue. There’s a lot of variables they can tweak in LED bulbs, and they’re definitely working on making warmer, more natural light come from them. I’ve got high hopes, fluorescents haven’t always had the good phosphor blends they do now, if you remember back to the old fluorescent tubes (or present-day cheap fluorescents) which made everything look greenish and unnatural.
In one of the international marine fish forums where I’m active, the latest buzz is LED lights replacing metal halides—which are the sort of lights you might find in movie projectors, that you have to avoid looking at or exposing yourself to, and that generate a huge amount of heat: I wouldn’t want the burn you’d get from touching a 10000 k MH light while it’s on; and you can’t look at it without discomfort that’s warning you not to look at it.
DIY folk are getting LED pieces and assembling LED rigs with controllers that mimic the par of the older style MH lights to create a light that will penetrate deeper aquariums and satisfy the needs of particular corals, which thrive at various depths—this warring with the desire of the owner for an eye-pleasing light. It’s quite a to-do—especially as there’s a very aggressive marketing from China, with individual sellers that try to imitate honest hobbyists and convince them that their brand is the hottest thing going. There’s a lot of human tinkering and futzing going on in that industry.
What hobbyists sincerely want is lights a controller can adjust to mimic certain lights and put through a day to moonlight cycle literally timed by the moon—coral breeding is apparently light-regulated: though honestly a coral spawn in your tank is not one of the good events unless you’re able to clean it up. What it does mean is that you’ve got happy corals, so they believe. Myself, I have very good coral growth on 10000k MH, so I think the Holy Grail of adjustable lights that will let you dial in what you’re growing is still a ways off, mostly dependent on hobbyists who have wild success with certain types to list the water conditions as well as lighting conditions under which it takes place. But the revolution is coming: used to pay big bucks for small, frequently burning-out HO lights to grow beneficial algaes; and now I use an over-the-counter 6500 k CFL for the same job.
VERY interesting! Taking notes…cuz I have “natural” lighting in my bedroom. I’ll be sleepy after watching TV in a darkened room then go in to read for a while before going to sleep…and suddenly wake up and can’t get to sleep. Gee…I wonder why? 😀
My alarm clock: I got a timer, a 6500 CFL bulb, a porch light in the fashion of a ship’s lantern, and a chain-and-lamp-grade-wire swag light kit from Lowe’s. Assemble porch light as a swag light, hang near window, attach timer, and viola, brilliant sunlight dawns at 5 am. A little exposure to that and you can’t get back to sleep. 😉
I’m going to have to try that alarm clock, CJ, since nothing but nothing seems to work for me. (right now I have two alarm clocks and a phone alarm set all over the apt. every night. I just get up, turn them off, and go back to sleep! [rolls eyes]).
Hanneke, I’m not much for the “Aliens visited the earth and seeded it with humans”, theory, but given: “There was an experiment (years ago) in which people stayed in a cave for a long time (weeks or months) without contact with external daily rythm signals; and their body-clocks natural rythms ended up closer to a 25 than 24 hour cycle.” one must wonder. . . 😉
@WoW, well, the very finely tuned melatonin-regulation seems to indicate the opposite.
Having the natural cycle just slightly longer than the earth’s day, plus the melatonin-resetting mechanism, means everybody gets their clocks reset at sunrise every day, so tiny natural variations can’t accumulate and make people start to diverge in their daily rythms over the years.
Of course this doesn’t work so wel in darkened bedrooms, and for people with the kind of blindness where light doesn’t reach the bloodvessels as well. And of course lots of bright light late at night isn’t good for the natural rythm either.
CJ’s alarm is probably the most natural way to wake up!
One of the experiments we did back in the dark ages in college biology was stick a bunch of rats in a closet, then hook up a whatsis that recorded how much time they spent on their wheels. We kept the lights on constantly in one closet, then put the others on a timer. The ones in the light all the time also showed a 25 hour or so activity cycle, so its probably not aliens… unless they left rats too!
It works and doesn’t frazzle your nerves with an electronic razz. Just light. Position it near a window so your brain accepts it as daylight. The 6500 k CFL’s are white, like full spectrum daylight, brilliant: get the one that’s 100 watt equivalent, uses about 23 watts of electricity. It’ll light your bedroom like a surgery…brilliant white. All those daylight chemicals start flowing and the brain believes it.
I’m not sure what my alarm clock is. My brain apparently. I have a clock radio programmed to go off at 6:45 during the week but I almost always wake up shortly after 6:15. Most days I have wait for a couple of minutes before going downstairs so that I turn the radio back off when the timer kicks on. Curiously at weekends and even vacations I wake up between an hour and two hours later.
I have a theory that I’m reading the time in my sleep. I once changed the clock for one that had a ceiling display (or was supposed to – it didn’t work very well) and my wake up patterns fluctuated. The alarm woke me more often and when it didn’t I often woke up feeling tense.
But my brain doesn’t always get it right. Sometimes I wake up around 6am because I want to go to the loo. That annoys me. It’s never so urgent that my body couldn’t have waited another half an hour 🙁
How well do the LED light bulbs spread the light around. My bike’s light is LED and it’s one helluva headlight, but it’s very focused.
Some of the so-called “tactical” flashlights can generate up to 200 lumens. Now, not knowing the conversion formula (if there even is one) for lumens to watts equivalence and vice versa, I don’t know how efficient they are. The brightness factor is designed to startle and dazzle an intruder, as well as illuminate a large area. They’re also ‘spensive, perhaps because of the high-output LEDs.
I have an even more effective alarm clock(s): 12 legs, 60 claws, and 3 sweet purrs seem to wake me whenever they believe it’s time for me to get up and let them have the bed to themselves. Sorry, WoW, I know you no longer have your fe-lions to wake you up in the morning, so perhaps CJ’s suggestion of the porch lamp might work for you.
“have the bed to themselves…” Surely you jest! The human must get up and feed the cats!
We finally (CJ’s idea and a good one) put an end to early morning kitty terrorism by refusing to feed until 8AM. I’ve been setting the timer when I get up so I don’t forget and now, when the buzzer rings, Shu looks at me, I say “breakfast?” and he runs for the kitchen. Seishi magically appears as soon as I start to put the food in the dishes.
And if you want Shu at any other point in the day, say smoooo-chies…and there he is. 😀
Food is very important to Shu….
@thegelf….perhaps you know the answer to this…I see comments about CCFLs…..what are they? Compact, compact lights?
Cold cathode fluorescents, probably. I’m not terribly familiar with them, so have a wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_cathode.
Very silly tangential question, but regarding that 25 hour cycle, could that indicate a slight shift, either in the Earth’s orbital distance, or the speed of its spin around its axis, or a little of both? My understanding is the orbital distances follow a nice geometric pattern discovered by one scientist and confirmed by another, around the 1500’s to 1700’s. IIRC, Copernicus and Tycho were in on that, but my knowledge of it is only thanks to some TV documentary. (Possibly Cosmos by Dr. Carl Sagan. That reminds me to rewatch the series.)
Heh heh…I was going to make a smartass comment about “anticipatory evolution” since a major effect of the moon has been to slow down the Earth’s rotation, but it’s also stabilized it so…probably not…
One has to consider the angular momentum of the Earth-Moon pair. The tidal bumps travelling around the Earth cause a friction (think of the tidal rise and fall of the earth, not the water) on the system. The consequence is the Earth slows, and the Moon slowly spirals farther away.
The earth’s rotation has slowed down over the millennia, due to tidal forces between the earth and the moon . The corollary to that is the length of a day is slowly increasing. 400 million years ago, we had a 22 hour day. Now we’re 24 hours and (very) slowly adding to that.
(I was just doing some of the reading I’d assigned my astronomy students for this week in Neil de Grasse Tyson’s (et al.) superb “One Universe: At Home in the Cosmos” p.43, on astrophysics and came across the specific figures.)
You have to pick LED bulbs carefully — the first ones I got from Sam’s Club a couple years ago were very disappointing. I’m extremely fond of these: http://menards.com/main/lighting-fans/light-bulbs/led/accent-18-led-a15-fan-clear/p-1729462-c-7482.htm They are decently bright — I use them as outdoor porch lights. They are well suited for northern climes, they don’t have the CFL problem of reduced effectiveness in cold, e.g. noticeable “warmup” times if you keep your house thermostat below 72, and even 24/7 burning CFL bulbs can be dimmed by outdoor temps near zero…