I am glad there are more posts on this. Are there any reasons why not considering LED strips at all? When installed properly with the “milk” diffuser and as indirect lightning, it’s IMO quite nice and effective. They seem to be powerful enough (20W are about 2k lumens/m), can be also found in high-CRI variants, less expensive, various CCT, dimmable, etc. I am considering using them in a new house. Basically, multiple parallel led (with different CCT, like 3000, 4500, 6400) strips diffused against a wall/ceiling, controlled via smart relays and incorporated in home automation (so physical switches turn e.g. just the one with 3000K after ~9pm).
I need to validate that in some studio, but my hope is that e.g. 50 000 lumens from 6x4 meters of high-CRI led strips of 3 different CCT diffused over a wall would provide sufficient daylight feeling + not taking any space, generate many shadows, looks nice and are OK to look at. If I could make it dimmable, it would be great, but there seem to be tradeoffs (dimmable ones are not that good on CRI apparently).
Btw. there are apps for phones with light detectors which seem to follow basic physics (like showing 4x times smaller number when being 2x times further from the source)
Thanks! The last time I was shopping for LED strips, they just weren’t bright enough to really light up a room, but it looks like that has changed. I’ll add something about this in the post.
BTW, what I was using LED strips for was “UFO lighting” around the base of my bed. The relatively dim, low CCT strips were attached around the bottom edge of my bed frame, with the LEDs pointing toward the floor. The scattered light was just enough to read by, and having the light mainly on the floor was good for not tripping over things if I had to get up in the middle of the night.
By the way, I asked about this setup on reddit. They also recommend some custom COBs, which seems to be the most powerful solution, but isn’t as practical as strips.
That’s a pretty good thread, and also reveals that there is an existing single-component solution for the scheduled dimmer potentiometer, from the aquarium sphere, which I hadn’t thought of at all. A hundred bucks is a bit more than I was hoping to see, since you still probably need one for each room, but at the very least it simplifies things for the early adopters.
I thought the strips seemed pretty attractive for people making their own setups, since they can passively cool and are already somewhat diffuse. I do think the intensity is plenty high enough (20,000lm in a 56x26cm board), but these Bridgelux COBs the fellow mentions are 10-15% as expensive per lumen as the Optisolis strips, and outperform them too, at least according to their own measurements. As he says, it’s not much more complicated electrically to set them up, but you do have to fasten them to a heatsink with thermal paste, and possibly mount a reflector, which makes things somewhat more tedious. Overall though, even with the expensive controller, a 20000lm device is probably still coming in under 200 USD for materials (not including however you mount it in the space), which is pretty similar to what you get out of the Hue bulbs.
Yeah, that’s useful. Agree on the assessment, I want to give it a shot with one of those Bridgelux Vesta Thrive thing, it sounds like a good hobby project I would like to try. If that happens, I would do a post about it here.
I am glad there are more posts on this. Are there any reasons why not considering LED strips at all? When installed properly with the “milk” diffuser and as indirect lightning, it’s IMO quite nice and effective. They seem to be powerful enough (20W are about 2k lumens/m), can be also found in high-CRI variants, less expensive, various CCT, dimmable, etc. I am considering using them in a new house. Basically, multiple parallel led (with different CCT, like 3000, 4500, 6400) strips diffused against a wall/ceiling, controlled via smart relays and incorporated in home automation (so physical switches turn e.g. just the one with 3000K after ~9pm).
I need to validate that in some studio, but my hope is that e.g. 50 000 lumens from 6x4 meters of high-CRI led strips of 3 different CCT diffused over a wall would provide sufficient daylight feeling + not taking any space, generate many shadows, looks nice and are OK to look at. If I could make it dimmable, it would be great, but there seem to be tradeoffs (dimmable ones are not that good on CRI apparently).
Btw. there are apps for phones with light detectors which seem to follow basic physics (like showing 4x times smaller number when being 2x times further from the source)
I just recently made my new ugly but sufficient lumenator (a combination of 6400K and 4500K CRI95+ 1500 lumen bulbs, still adding additional ones) and also managed to integrate a WiFi relay with Smart Bulbs to my home automation via Home Assistant with a fallback to manual switch. I also tried Home Assistant’s “flux” component which sets the colour and brightness based on the sun position but replaced that idea with being less-sun-dependent. I want to have a lot of light until e.g. 8 pm regardless of the light outside and only then start dimming to red. Simple variant is plain automation with templating, hard but dynamic.
Thanks! The last time I was shopping for LED strips, they just weren’t bright enough to really light up a room, but it looks like that has changed. I’ll add something about this in the post.
BTW, what I was using LED strips for was “UFO lighting” around the base of my bed. The relatively dim, low CCT strips were attached around the bottom edge of my bed frame, with the LEDs pointing toward the floor. The scattered light was just enough to read by, and having the light mainly on the floor was good for not tripping over things if I had to get up in the middle of the night.
By the way, I asked about this setup on reddit. They also recommend some custom COBs, which seems to be the most powerful solution, but isn’t as practical as strips.
That’s a pretty good thread, and also reveals that there is an existing single-component solution for the scheduled dimmer potentiometer, from the aquarium sphere, which I hadn’t thought of at all. A hundred bucks is a bit more than I was hoping to see, since you still probably need one for each room, but at the very least it simplifies things for the early adopters.
I thought the strips seemed pretty attractive for people making their own setups, since they can passively cool and are already somewhat diffuse. I do think the intensity is plenty high enough (20,000lm in a 56x26cm board), but these Bridgelux COBs the fellow mentions are 10-15% as expensive per lumen as the Optisolis strips, and outperform them too, at least according to their own measurements. As he says, it’s not much more complicated electrically to set them up, but you do have to fasten them to a heatsink with thermal paste, and possibly mount a reflector, which makes things somewhat more tedious. Overall though, even with the expensive controller, a 20000lm device is probably still coming in under 200 USD for materials (not including however you mount it in the space), which is pretty similar to what you get out of the Hue bulbs.
Yeah, that’s useful. Agree on the assessment, I want to give it a shot with one of those Bridgelux Vesta Thrive thing, it sounds like a good hobby project I would like to try. If that happens, I would do a post about it here.