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Comment by _yb2s | Hacker News Reader

I don't really see an advantage to this over just installing fixed warm color temperature lights in the house. Depends on the building I suppose, but a well designed house should have enough natural light to only use the lights at the time when you would want 'warm.' If you live in at high latitude and need a 'SAD' light for morning and daytime use, that will always be a different light fixture and system, and therefore doesn't require this type of setup either.

Ultimately, regular indoor lights just aren't bright enough to engage the biological response of daylight, regardless of color temperature.

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Maybe in California you don't need this, but in the northern half of Europe (i.e. Germany and above) the weather this time of year is pretty abysmal. My office has floor to ceiling glass on three sides, but today at 2pm we had to turn on the lights because it was so cloudy and dark. The 10kWp of solar on my roof produced 2kWh today.

I agree that most indoor lights are not bright enough, but that's mainly because there hasn't been an easy way to regulate them. There's no reason why you can't light your living space to 500 or more lux (most living rooms are barely 150 lux) at 6500k and regulate it down at night, and something like this makes it easy to do.

When I was living in Germany I felt like I was an astronaut in December because it never got very bright during the day and the nights seemed to last forever. My biological clock quickly got unstuck and started running free.

wait till you experience Norway of Finland, its a serious issue up there

My office looks like candlelit… on dark days you get so sleepy.

I found I need about 20k lux for much of the day to not feel sleepy or depressed in the daytime. I had to move to California and work outdoors to overcome this, I used to live far north, but even "extremely bright" indoor lights weren't enough to have a positive effect on me.

Do you mean lumen?

I've never heard of lighting a space more than 500-1000 lux unless extreme fine detail work is being done. At 20k lux would you even be able to see what's on your computer screen?

I did mean lux, and what you are saying is exactly my point. I can't easily light indoor areas that bright, so I need to be outside. There are a few people online that have experimented with indoor lighting that bright for seasonal depression, but it's expensive to do.

You do realize Northern Europeans are adapted to needing less sunlight? I would emulate candles if I were you. Which means warm color temperatures. So you don't need the product of this thread, you just need a simple warm color temperature bulb. Do some extra research and get one that doesn't flicker.

Northern European here. No... No, we are not. We suffer from pretty extreme depression during the dark months which has been largely ignored until recently.

Some people get it bad (like me) some people get it mildly. For some reason I can't find figures right now but I recall it being something like 10% of people living in northern Europe get SAD seriously and up to 30% more mildly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder

> You do realize Northern Europeans are adapted to needing less sunlight?

... Do you think people don't travel, or that we only have Northern Europeans living here in Europe?

I think that your assertion about high color temperature being important is less strong than you thought it was.

I dunno.

I spend time in the evening working on art projects where the color rendition of LED-based "warm" bulbs is awful (can't tell the difference between the coated and uncoated sides of inkjet paper), although there are some halogen-based "warm" bulbs that are a lot better.

Most of the lights in my house are set to "warm" but I do use "cool" when I need to make fine sensory distinctions and I have a work area with a few of those halogen-based bulbs that I turn on as needed.

https://www.solux.net/cgi-bin/tlistore/colorviewbulbs.html

Nothing's going to beat incandescent/halogen for color rendition :)

That said we did have pretty good results with the (IIRC) Philips high CRI fluorescent tubes. Working at the photo lab it was a trip taking a print from the back (good lights) to the reception area (regular commercial lights) to the outside and seeing the colors on the print shift.

Depends on where you live. Where I'm at it gets dark at 4:30PM in the winter.

From lookin on amazon, SAD lights seem to be ~10k lux. I have 8*Lifx BR-30 at 1100 Lux each in my kitchen/living room. Seems pretty close.

SAD lights are used at distance of 1-2 ft to get that brightness.

Your bulbs are probably 1100 lumen. Lumen and lux are different. Specifying lux requires specifying the distance or area. 8800 lumen on ceiling would be more like 800 lux at normal distance. Which is a bright room but not sunlight bright which is needed for SAD.

>a well designed house

What fraction of houses do you think qualify? Hence what proportion might benefit from technology?

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