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Apartment Lit Solely by LEDs
(eternal_software) writes "A company called Vos Solutions created what they call 'a blueprint for future living' named The Vos Pad. The Vos Pad is the world's first apartment solely lit by LEDs. There are some images of the place up on their website."
So, its funny but iTunes spun up Nightclubbing by Iggy Pop as soon as I clicked on the link to the sight, because that is exactly what this looks like to me. If I were single and 18-23 again perhaps I might think this was cool, but come on now. I was really hoping that by clicking on the link I was going to see real LED lights (perhaps spectrally tuned to the wavelength of sunlight) that could really light a house. I don't think we are that far away from other applications like automobile headlights and real replacement sources for household lighting, but this is not quite there. This to me is more like mood lighting or decorative lighting rather than household lighting.
Also, it appears that the apartment is not lit entirely by LEDs as ACDC lighting systems are providing cold cathode lighting as well.
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Any ideas on why led lights for the home are not more widely available? The technology is not new.
The site reports that that led lights are up to 10,000% longer lasting and can produce up to 10 times more light than incandescent bulbs.
The site also states that led's use less power and are less expensive.
I'm laughing at clouds.
What does it cost to have this done? What are the monthly saving each month?
The site is /.'ed so I can't be sure it's the same but there was an article throughout the newsrags (NYTimes, LA Times, etc) this past week on a guy who lit his entire apartment soley by LEDs. The hardware cost him $50K. Too much really. To spend that kind of dough, there's gotta be some additional win. But you'll get a lot farther with a woman, for example, by spending that same amount on a nice car you pick her up in and a few nice dinners than on unfamiliar lighting she finds intimidating.
Off topic, but I gave a bunch of these really cool LED flashlights for Christmas: http://www.techass.com The Elite is really nice and very bright.
Why are all the pictures taken during the day? What does it look like at night?
So the question is when will prices really come down? Isn't the big problem making blue LEDs [cheaply]? When will the masses wake up and upgrade?
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
all LED lighting....must bee inexpensive to power those I bet.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Actually, yes. Although not at the moment. A few years ago I was playing with LEDs a lot while working on data aquisition stuff. I thought it would be cool to use only rehargable LED lamps to light my place. I rather dislike cords. It worked quite well actually, and I intend to fit my next boat out the same way.
Mind you I didn't use them as a replacment for normal lighting as we know it. I used them more like a high tech oil lamp or candle so most people might have found the system lacking.
Japanese style lanterns make particularly lovely LED lamps. Quick, cheap and easy to make if you just want a little mood lighting without the fire risk of the real thing. Or try the old punch some holes in a coffee can trick.
Soon the lure of the light switch called though and I returned to using conventional electric lamps and conventional oil lamps. It was an interesting experiment though. I still keep a couple of LED paper lanterns on poles about the place for fun.
If I were going to build off the grid (like that boat or the cabin in Montana) I wouldn't have any hesitation about lighting it with a combination of LEDs and oil (never put your eggs all in one basket).
KFG
Once again, designers make a laughing stock out of themselves by refusing to use common sense. As a result, their "prototype" has obviously never been lived in for even a few hours. Three glaring points:
- LCD TV. Above the stove. So it can catch the oil crackling in the pan, the smell when something gets burned, as has occasionally been known to happen and the condensation when cooking something in boiling water. Yeah, right! No way anyone's going to hang an expensive LCD there.
- The bed. In the middle of an open square, so it takes maximum space. This is a bit so-so as they might have thought of a couple. The whole room gives off a rich-bachelor feeling to me, though. Most bachelors I know have the bed pushed up against one wall to conserve space.
- The sinks in the bathroom. They're round bowls with no shelf space in sight. Where do you put toothbrush, toothpaste, hair gel, combs, shaver, soap? Well, I'm sure the tooth fairy will be ready to hold them for a while.
As you can see, I don't think that what is shown in the pictures has anything to do with an apartment, which is made up of connected rooms where and this is important! people need to live, and need to want to live.Divide et impera!
A standard fluorescent bulb flickers at 60 Hz.
With 4 diodes (at a few cents each) you can build a full wave rectifier that will let you connect an LED to AC power without flicker.
Jason
ProfQuotes
That said however, I've ordered a bunch of of Luxeon LEDs in various colors - mostly the "warm whites" - to play around with. I think if you did this in a decent house or apartment with colors that didn't induce vomiting you could end up with something pretty special.
I work for the company which did the lighting in there www.acdclighting.co.uk The lighting is a colour changing rgb system so you can have any colour you want at any time of the day
I recently got a full complement of fluroescent bulbs for my apartment; they replaced all of my regular light bulbs with dramatic energy savings: for example, I replaced my 60-Watt bulbs with equivalent fluroescent bulbs that provide just as much light but only use 14 watts each. My only remaining "normal" light bulbs are in the bathroom, where I have some of those fancy globe-type lights over the sink.
My electric bill dropped under 30 bucks as a result. Not bad, eh? And, that's keeping a couple of lights on at all times.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
So it looks like it would be OK to walk around it, but it's missing some basic things, such as directional lighting for reading. LED's provide narrow directional light, which is fine for washes of light (when diffused with lenses or diffusers) or small pin-spots, but the designers don't appear to have tried to create light at the scale needed for common things like sitting on the couch and reading or cooking.
x /2 5mm_med_index.htm
Btw, I've had my apartment stairway lit with white LED replacement bulbs from LEDTronics for 5 years (continuously! Never turned off because it's too dark to find the switches, which is why I installed the bulbs in the first place.). It's worked great, except that they've now faded to the point they no longer provide enough light to walk up the stairs with, but it's taught me that the technology isn't ready to replace all the bulbs in the house. Here's their full line of replacement bulbs:
http://www.led.net/datasheets/25mm_medbase_inde
You seem to know a lot about this off the grid stuff. I read many of your posts and come off as this geeky woodsman how-stuff-works kind of guy.
:)
Thank you. Thank you very much.
You saved money. Good for you. Most people in your position live a bit above their means and end up with all sorts of payments they can't make when the job goes away. You're ahead of the game already and show evidence of the sort of thinking that might make it off the grid.
An Adobe hut in Mexico is a lovely way to live. I spent a few months in a couple back in the late 60s. $20,000 should last you about 20 years if you live a bit American. You can live off the interest damn near forever if you aculturate. Yes, it really is that cheap to live there. Adobde is absolutely delightful to live in in the appropriate enviroment (desert}. Hell itself in the wrong one (rainforest). I've tried both. I enjoy it for a time, the desert is lovely, but I'm from the northeast mountains and start longing for trees and meadows after awhile. A bit of ocean doesn't hurt either.
Books. Lessee. There really aren't too many good ones. Most of them are written by "back to nature" types. There's a difference between back to nature and off the grid. One is a philosophy (generally propounded by city folk), the other is just living. Just living, on the whole, works better as a philosophy of living than a "philosophy of living" does. The trick is to adopt the proper mindset and adapt yourself to the life, rather than trying to force the way of life into some preconcieved notion of "the way things should be."
On the whole "nature" doesn't give a shit about "the way things should be" and just goes about her business as usual. If you get squashed along the way, well, that's natural.
The people who actually live like this don't normally write books about it. It's just normal life to them, why write about it?
But there are some exceptions and a handful of books not overtly intended for off the grid living that can be invaluable.
First off there's Walden of course, if only for inspiration, but there's a fair amount of very practical advice on living in there. Remember, the whole point was an experiment in living. Throw in Life Without Principle. If you read this and say "Yes! That's what life is all about" you'll probably have a shot at living off the grid. Anybody contemplating any sort of nonconventional living ought to read these. They're both available on the web.
One of the most valuable books you can possibly own if you're going to build any sort of shelter, from a shed to a mansion on the edge of town is Rex Robert's "Your Engineered House." If you've read my posts much you've heard me mention this one before. It's a must. Written in a conversational style that you can read like a novel and illustrated with his own crude pen drawings this book is a marvel. He covers everything in this book and will leave you wiser about home building than an entire library shelf full of other books.
***BUY THIS BOOK***
Did I make myself clear?
It's out of print. You'll pay at least triple it's original cover price to acquire it used (I'm not the only one who reveres this book. Last time I looked there were copies available on Amazon), maybe double that if you want a really clean copy with dustjacket. Pay whatever you have to. Diamonds aren't cheap.
Square Foot Gardening. How to grow the most food, the easiest. Forget everything you know about farming. Conventional farming is medieval ideas about how to grow food en mass for the masses. You want modern ideas about how to just grow food for you. This one will get you started. Supplement with any book about container gardening that catches your eye.
I'm afraid I've never seen a single book beyond the technique of growing food off the grid that was worth a crap though. Honestly, they're all pretty much garbage. You can cherry pick them for bits of info though
Depends on where you're from I guess. I've lived in three. They all had original art deco electric lighting fixures in them. One still had the original wiring (shudder).
Remember that in the 1920s rural farmhouse didn't necessarily mean out in the boonies. More often than not it meant being situated right about where your suburb is now since they hauled fresh produce into the city, often on a daily basis. They didn't fly the stuff in from Argentina and a farm had to be proximate to the city.
This sort of farmhouse generally got electric lighting about WWI in my neck of the woods (upstate NY, proximate to General Electric).
KFG
"Your colour vision would go all out of whack as you move from room to room"
I have this problem at home with the bathroom and hallway, both of which are lit with GE's "Pure White Light" bulbs. They're not actually white, more of a freakishly bright blue-ish, purple-ish color that hurts my eyes but I'm not the one that makes the household decor decisions. When I go to any other room, the normal incandecsent lighting makes the rooms look all yellow.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
LED lights will eventually replace fluorescents, incandescents and other traditional forms of interior illumination. There's all kinds of reasons :
The colors are bright and pure when you want them to be, and significant progress has been made towards (simulated) full-spectrum light. The lights are cool and run on low voltage, are much more efficient than fluorescents and have very long lifetimes.
Cost is coming down (slowly) and eventually LEDs will be reasonable replacements for ordinary lightbulbs, with similar light characteristics except for added features such as optional color control and the like.
The Vos Pad is silly because like so many posters have pointed out, it's as uninhabitable as the star trek apartment that other guy built. Plus, it looks incredibly gay with those colors. Just an immensely complex concept piece demonstrating how not to use LED light fixtures. The Vos Pad appears dark and spooky, a movie set rather than a home. And the light beams coming from the floor will be incredibly annoying. But all this don't mean the technology itself is invalid.
LED lit homes can conveivably be every bit as practical as ordinary types. LEDs can be fitted into whole new kinds of fixtures that wouldn't be possible to make with conventional technologies. The LEDs are so versatile they can be built into anything and arranged in any pattern or configuration imaginable. Thin panels or stripes of light could be fitted under shelves or hidden in the ceiling so as to provide advanced discrete lighting without the hassle of bulb replacement.
As a test project a little while I ago I drew up a fancy model for a dream bathroom in a 3D program, accurately picturing discreet LED illumination with color accents and proper work surface brightness and no nasty point lightsources burning out retinas.
The render engine used was precise enough using photon maps, global illumination and caustics, that you could get a reasonable estimate of the number of LEDs on any given spec you need to light a room properly. You can pretty much go in with a virtual light meter and measure how much light hits any given simulated surface point and add more lights until you have the desired brightness. (As a photographer I have a nice digital spot lightmeter, and was able to calibrate the model using a handful of Nichia superbright white LEDs for reference.)
Turns out you need hundreds of LEDs to get an equivalent brightness to just a few 25 watt halogens. But if I had the cash to splash I'd definitely consider it for my new apartment!
When in Tokyo, visit Roppongi Hills and witness the glorious displays of LED illumination in and around the plaza at the base of the skyscraper complex. There's even LED illumination in the stairways and sometimes in the trees around the plaza too.
I've thought of it. It would take a few volumes. :) Just the idea of living off the grid is a full book. Witness Walden.
Well, lessee again. Dirty never killed anyone you know. Unsanitary will kill you, unpleasantly at that, but it's a modern city myth that dirty and unsanitary are the same thing. In any case, what makes you think you'll suddenly forget how to wash? Going off the grid doesn't mean suddenly forgetting everything you know about living. Get some water. Use it. In one of the adobe huts I lived in, the shabbiest one of the bunch, I had to clamber down a nearly sheer embankment 1/4 mile to a spring for water. I didn't go dirty. I just hauled water.
I remember reading a piece on the web about some guy who lost his job and decided to live in a tent. He was in your position. He had money. He didn't "have" to, but the idea of living cheaply, "close to nature" and off the grid appealed. So he left his apartment, got a tent, found some woods and moved in. (Come to think of it one of my physics classmates as an undergrad lived on campus in a tent for two years before they made him stop. He prefered it. Us physicists are weird you know). Then he got another job, but continued to live in the tent for awhile. He didn't last. He hated doing things like having to walk too far every morning to jump in an ice cold stream to wash.
Well, he obviously never bothered to think very much about what he was doing. Why did he suddenly forget you can go to K-Mart and pick up a collapsible 5 gallon water jug with a spigot on it? Did he do something daft like not buy a good camp stove? And if he did, why did he suddenly forget that he could use it to heat bath water? For that mattter why didn't he bother to acquire an army surplus collasible bath? (There's an entire episode of M*A*S*H that revolves around one of these for goodness sake). Or he could have obtained a five gallon paint bucket on trash day, some old hose to go with it and made himself a gravity fed shower, which, in fact, could also double as a complete gravity fed plumbing system (even cities still have gravity fed water tanks. You shouldn't have to be from the woods to think of this). Fresh water is a dear commodity when blue water sailing. You can't waste it on showers. Running out can be fatal. But no one need go dirty. You take an old fashioned tea kettle. Fill it with salt water. Put it up to boil. Fresh steam comes out the spout. You catch it on a sponge and have a nice, toasty warm sponge bath.
So you're afraid of being dirty. So don't be dirty. Wash. There's a couple dozen perfectly nifty ways to accomplish this if you don't get locked into thinking that "wash" means "upstairs bathroom."
Bored. Books are cheap. You go to a library sale on the last half day and walk away with shopping bags of books at a couple dollars a bag. A lot of O'Reilly books are showing up at these these days. All the "dime" novels you can choke down. Complete encyclopedias for next to nothing. Even lots of books directly relevant to living off the grid like gardening books. Our ancestors read a lot.
They played a lot of music too. Get ahold of a fiddle or something.
But on the whole I've never found being bored to be an issue except when leading a fairly conventional life. Living off the grid is active and interesting as all hell. You have do things, make things, invent things and think about things. The greatest thing about it is there's very little distinction between labor and leisure. The concepts lose most meaning when you don't have a boss. Work is leisure. leisure is your work. There's no "job." It's just living. Living can be fun.
Ok. Family issues. I'll add a book. J. Krishnamurti; Think on These Things. Chapter 11. Conformity and Revolt. It might give you something to, ummmm, think on. The rest of the book isn't too bad either.
RV squatting in the woods. Actually, there's a small, very loosely knit community that's doing exactly that right now
Also, my friend's porphyria is a really rare and strange disease which means she is akin to a vampire. She has the EP variety. Only approximately 300 more like her in the US.
Is this different than Xeroderma Pigmentosum? That's the condition I am more familiar with. (The children in The Others are afflicted with Xeroderma Pigmentosum. There was also a very touching story on NPR several years ago about a night-camp for children with Xeroderma Pigmentosum, since they couldn't go to daycamp. That was the only time I have ever heard an NPR reporter actually break down in tears.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'