T5 54W blue fluorescents
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It's been some time since I've posted.
I have a few T5 fixtures and was thinking of purchasing some blue lights. The color spectrum is around the 460nm range blue with some aqua and a small spike of green.
So if I run two of these, would be a good wake up light? I can find these for about 22 bucks on ebay, and while not terribly cheap, they would hopefully put out about 3200 lumens a peice or more.
Is there another light you would recommend for bright blue light, or a light box? Most led bulbs don't seem to put off much light, and those that do are expensive.
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@Tungsten_smooth yes it would "work" but I think you may not enjoy the color quality since it will be very blue.
A more practical light might be the Philips T5 activiva, if you can still find some. Those are about 17,000K so more like a blue sky.
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@herf Yeah, I have other lights, I just want something strong to strongly shift my circadiam rhythm. It's so common to wake up at 7 A.M. and my sleep shcedule is much later than I'd like, and I naturally wake up around 7:45 (DST) as it is now, or slightly later. Ironically, if this were winter time, I could adjust fairly quick, and I'd actually be able to get up without feeling tired.
I can push through it, but it's not at all enjoyable until at least 45 minutes or so, when I finally feel more awake. So, instead of waking up at 7:00, I now need to wake up at 6:00, which most people think is no big deal.
I guess I should have a shcedule fpr the eastern edge of timezone's and live near those areas, does that work? Would I get the extra 60 minutes if I moved timezones, but stay on the east line of them, is that how that works?
I don't want to spend $180 on a retimer or buy a light box either. I also luckily have a few programmable timed outlets, so I can program these intense blue lights. So if I am to push my wake schedule a whole hour, (or more) to wake up at 6:00 A.M. winter/standard time, what time should I program the lights to come on to artificially shift my circadian rhythm?
I already wear orange eyewear (uvex orange) to avoid bright white after sunset, and get outside in the morning and noon.
So the only way I see making this work is to artificially trick my body into thinking the sky is shining bright so that when it's 6:00 A.M., I'll already be awake.
I also have some programmable lights, and while they are quite bright, I want to make sure I have as much light as possible I'd like to start with the dimmer programmable lights, with orange first, then amber, then dull white, then daylight white, then blue.
Then once those are near half brightness on blue, I'll turn on the tubes, which, you probably know, take about 7-8 minutes or more to reach full brightness, so it will have a nice fade up as well.
What time should I start adding light to make this work, and wake up at 6 ST?
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@Tungsten_smooth well one way to think about this is to compare efficacy per watt - and it's easy to look at this per "output" watt, but plug efficiency is somewhat different:
https://fluxometer.com/rainbow/#!id=lights/Philips TLD blue
Here we measured a Philips blue tube, and the "Actinic power / total power" is listed at 55.15%. So that's 55% as efficient as a "peak melanopsin" light, meaning that of the photons our spectrometer counted, it's 55% optimal at stimulating melanopsin.
ActiViva is 39.6% efficient there.
A regular 5000K lamp is 31% efficient. The numbers aren't that different.
But then you have to consider the plug efficiency (inclusive of how much goes to heat/ballast/etc.), and this will be a lot better with LED, up to 2x. So, you might find per watt you put in, a "nicer" white LED might be just as effective as the blue, and certainly easier to live with.
Two things then:
- The main thing is to make the light levels high enough, and that it's comfortable so you can do it every day. I'd rather double the light output of a white light than have a blue light that you don't like to be around.
- The light has to be close enough to your eyes to make the target light level, so a great light far away of course isn't really that effective. Light therapy boxes are used at 12" - so the ergonomics matter a lot here too.
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@herf I still have trusty dusty PWM flickering (even at full brightness) Philips Hue version 1 bulbs. (I hate PWM)
Would the 6500K setting be good enough with three of them about an arm's length away? Would it be more effective to use both blue and green as in the energize setting, or end up at blue only? Seems like blue and green would be significantly brighter, looking at the charts.
I also have some near 5000K+ tubes I already have that came with the fixtures, so I could use all three of those, probably 7,000 lumens or more total, could be 10,000 lumens easily.
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@Tungsten_smooth yes, in a directional light, lumens=lux at 1 meter. In a hue bulb (600lm) it's radiating in all directions so it is somewhat less. If you want 10,000 lux you would have to be very close or have a dozen or more bulbs at arm's length. Not easy to do with this form factor.
Hue v1 maxes out its melanopic content in the mid-4000K range because it employs the most "chips" and the illuminance is somewhat higher as a result.
The tubes are likely more directional and would probably be better. Many ad-hoc lightboxes were built like this. But also there are reasonable light therapy panels online for $50 that will make this amount of light to, though some of them have to be used very close to the eye as well.
Don't forget to diffuse the light - staring at any of these lights directly for 30m can be quite painful.
