Testing Blue Wavelength in Philips Hue
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Hi - long time F.lux user here.
I recently bought two Philips Hue "White Ambiance" smart bulbs - not the regular Hue, these have no option for RGB. Well, I felt they were maybe disrupting my sleep. I reflected the light with a DVD and it did have some blue in it.
I'm wondering if anybody has data or insights about blue wavelength production with this model. Perhaps I was simply looking at them too brightly. I searched this forum and couldn't find a clear answer.
Thank you!
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It's on my list to put up some data about these and other smart bulbs. Philips tends to be pretty good, but dimming definitely helps.
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@mpiazza said in Testing Blue Wavelength in Philips Hue:
Hi - long time F.lux user here.
I recently bought two Philips Hue "White Ambiance" smart bulbs - not the regular Hue, these have no option for RGB. Well, I felt they were maybe disrupting my sleep. I reflected the light with a DVD and it did have some blue in it.
I'm wondering if anybody has data or insights about blue wavelength production with this model. Perhaps I was simply looking at them too brightly. I searched this forum and couldn't find a clear answer.
Thank you!
Hi
As I am about to buy a philips hue system I am interested in what you mean with "these have no rgb". Is it the ambiance version that has no such option or the regular one? And what are your experiences with your product? -
Well the thing to understand is that any "warm" light still has a significant amount of blue in it, unless it's red. So color-tuning gets you maybe a factor of three from the coolest to warmest setting, but your body needs at least 100:1 from day to night.
The trick is to get the number below the level where it really affects your body, and this is a combination of intensity and spectrum.
So whatever schedule you use, you should schedule lots of dimming too (unless you have one bulb in a 1000sf room).
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@herf said in Testing Blue Wavelength in Philips Hue:
Well the thing to understand is that any "warm" light still has a significant amount of blue in it, unless it's red. So color-tuning gets you maybe a factor of three from the coolest to warmest setting, but your body needs at least 100:1 from day to night.
The trick is to get the number below the level where it really affects your body, and this is a combination of intensity and spectrum.
So whatever schedule you use, you should schedule lots of dimming too (unless you have one bulb in a 1000sf room).
So, buying a white ambience version which tends to give 'orange' color is not a good idea. Instead we should have a hue color bulb wich can give red color?
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We can look at numbers once I post some, but I do think that dimming is important, and I think orange colors look better. I wouldn't want my house in all-red, though maybe firelight would be ok.
I would dim your lights and avoid very bright lights at night regardless of the color - there is a chance (from the research) that they are very stimulating even if they don't have a circadian effect.
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Super interested in this, I made a little python program for a Raspberry pi that changes the color to orange at night. I got a basic kid's spectrograph and found an orange that has little blue light. (In the hue api at [.524, .432]) As you say orange is much more livable than going for pure red.
That said I'd love to figure out the real measurements with an actual spectrometer, and a color choice where it has the least blue. Any advice on how to do this? Or has anyone else already done this and have good tips on good colors to chose?
@herf any suggestions on how to do this in a way that others could also use? I was thinking about renting a spectrometer from a photo supply shop for a weekend. (They seem to be about $3000 to buy.)
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Yes we have some cheaper options in the works...
i think there are a few different spectra to measure.... at least:
- the v1's had a desaturated green, and the newer ones have a wider range of colors, and the white ambiance seem to be a mixture of two WLEDs.
Actually I do have some older measurements of the v1 bulbs here, but they were done on a meter I don't trust very much:
https://fluxometer.com/rainbow/#!id=Philips Hue/6500k-hueWith the BR30 bulbs we have (not the ones above), there isn't a lot of benefit to going cooler than 4500K (unless you like it) - the illuminance goes down and the melanopic effect isn't really increased very much.
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Any comments on meters you've liked?
I've got v2 color bulbs and a lightstrip. I thought I might as well get as close to zero melanopic light as possible at night. Any blue in the spectrum isn't helping at night. During the day the Raspberry pi program cranks it back up to white. (I'm on mac by the way, so i use flux for the screen but not for controlling the Hue lights.)
Currently I just look at the light through the cheap spectrograph and use the hue app to move around the orange color range. There's actually some surprisingly large amounts of blue in some orange looking areas, but it's hard to be precise with the simple spectrograph I have.
