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Fiber Optics Bring the Sun Indoors
Sterling D. Allan writes "Fiber optics transmit light, so why not take the light from outside and transmit it inside? According to an exclusive story at PESN, that is what Tennessee company, Sunlight Direct, is now doing. Their 4-foot-diameter solar dish will light 1000 square feet inside -- minus the harmful UV rays -- rendering a more natural lighting feel, which can be hybridized with florescent and possibly LED lighting to provide a constant light level, though the tone changes with the level of light outside. The GPS-based sun-tracking mechanism uses very little energy. Now you can save electricity, cut on heat emissions by incandescent, and improve the feel of your work environment. Beta testing began in June. Product expected in the market in 2007."
we don't need light in our basements!! FP?
In the Australian interior (Coober Pedy and Lightning Ridge) they build many homes undergound...thsi kinds of thing would be perfect. Natural air conditioning and natural light sources.
The Ark Mori Building in Tokyo had a fiber optic solar light distribution system installed something like 10 years ago. I remember seeing a video of the system. It's been out for 10 years, but nobody did anything to follow it. My conclusion: it's worthless.
A guy who works at "Pure Energy System" posts exclusive article posted on PESN (Pure Energy System News)? Isn't that the same as a free ad?
Not that anything wrong with that...
now slap some fucking soil and grass and trees on those concrete roofs and we're in business.
This doesn't seem that new. Folx have had large-scale "fibre optic" types of skylights that can reach to basements and other areas for quite some time. I think they are even available at Home Depot.
www.solartube.com comes to mind right off the bat...
John Soward...University of Kentucky
You insensitive clod!
I don't remmber where I saw it, but I saw a system like this on TV about 10 years ago. I mean, these guys might be the first to do it comercially, or cheaply, but the idea has been around for ages. I'm sure a slashdot reader somewhere works in a facility that already has something like this in place?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
using gps to track the sun? way to go!
p.s. won't this give cancer to peacful iraqi rioters?
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
Even when raining, the outdoor light feels much more comfortable and natural than indoor incandescent lightbulbs. I imagine the idea has been around since Gog the Hut Thatcher fell through one of his creations and the hut owners just left the hole in the roof.
Nowadays, they've got a nice system where the light is guided through a reflective tube that can be directed to any room in the house.
http://www.solatube.com/
It was only natural that the techonology would progress to where we are splitting the sunshine into fiber optics and redirecting them all over the house. However, 2007 is a pretty long way off for what seems to be a relatively simple application of existing technologies.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
I could have swore a couple years ago Slashdot had the same, if not something down right identicle, to this story before.
:)
It's a neat idea though.
I remember seeing pictures of these on Japanese office buildings in the early 80s. They were called "Sunflowers", and they were mostly prototypes I think, and had a honeycomb set of collectors which piped the sunlight into the building.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Is there any way to store the photons in sunlight? Not convert them to electrons, then reemit them, but "trap" the photons in some medium, then emit them at some arbitrary later date? Without transforming some amount of their energy to heat or other mechanical energy. For retransmission later, like when the sun goes down.
Maybe a nanomaze of fiber, a few wavelengths in diameter, twisting its way around inside a cubic centimeter? If such a "photon trap" were millions of meters in length, it might be able to absorb photons for a while, before the first ones trapped finally made their way around the loop to the surface, during which time the trap could be closed (with a mirror, cycling the photons through the circuit until it was opened again. Or maybe an input window that's mirrored only on the inside, trapping photons continuously, until another mirrored facet is removed. Or a spiral maze of MEMs mirrors which send light around the cycle, until one is tilted away from the cycle, towards the output.
Is there any kind of work on "photonic storage"?
--
make install -not war
Studies have shown people respond better to natural light than to artificial light, so it looks like they're trying to take advantage of that. Whether it's true or not, I dont know. I probably spend most of my time in artificial light and with the exception of encouraging me to post on Slashdot it hasn't had any negative side-effects.
My Company
The UV rays are not going to transfer through the fiber...think about it. And if somehow (in an alternate reality) the UV did travel through, you would just need a giant set of blue blockers to hold in front of the fiber lights. A blue blocker lamp shade perhaps?
Seriously though, this is great if you're in a sunny climate. Here in Michigan it would be of limited use 6 months out of the year, but still it'd be awesome.
RTFS!
God. Why does stupidity exponentiate when people desire to get an early post on a story?
Sun, via fiber to free space = darn efficient
Both the first paragraph of the article AND the description answer your concerns about harmful rays. Good job paying attention...
Why is a company that chooses not to filter UV any more liable than a government that chooses not to install a giant pair of Oakley sunglasses over the entire U.S.? I agree that filtering UV is a very, very good idea, but I don't see why not doing so merits a lawsuit.
Incidentally, the most efficiency you can hope to acheive with a solar panel is around 10% or so, and even that's an optimistic estimate I believe.
Because solar panels are not that cheap, and you waste a lot of energy when you convert energy from one form to another.
You would get very close to 100% efficiency by redirecting sunlight straight into a room than by converting it into electricty and then back to light again.
I moved my office from a building where we had NO windows. Productivity has gone up tremendously. We don't feel as worn out at the end of the day, and we don't feel like we missed out on anything.
I saw this on the Discovery channel, and it's fantastic for commerical space as you can distribute 'natural' light all over the office where windows can't be located. It saves on energy use as well. As yes, there are UV filters.
I wish it was a little more affordable, i'd do it in a heart beat.
RTFSOTA (Read The Fucking Summary Of The Article)
Because photovoltaic cells have a limited lifespan. Some articles found state that a lifespan can be unlimited, some say about 30-35 years, but I've heard that the practical lifespan for powering household current is about 7 years- About as long as it takes to recoup the cost of purchasing the things in the first place.
Also, it can't be nearly as efficient to convert light to energy and back to light again as it is to simply redirect the light where it's wanted.
Of course, this would only work while the sun's up- You'd still need lightbulbs and other lighting infrastructure to light at night.
Rerouting outside lighting to the interior isn't new, of course: see windows and sky lights. :)
Though, this story reminded me of an episode from Beyond 2000 of a Japanese company that used a concentrator on the outside but instead of using the light for interior lighting it was some sort of therapeutic device. This was probably about a decade ago when I saw it, so the details are kind of hazy...
Does it surprise me that the Japanese had the whole sunlight-through-fiber idea a decade ago?
:wq
Blast a thinkgeek laser beam in reverse from your cubicle fiber port and wake up some alien race.
During the cold war there was much competition between American and Russian office productivity. The Americans spent millions delevoping a system to direct sunlight into buildings. It was awesome in its capabilities. The sun tracker used very little energy, the interior of the building was laced with miles of fiber optic cabling. All in all a wonder of modern engineering triumph.
When face with a similar problem, the Soviets used a "window".
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Here's an article from 1999, which notes: ..."
m
"Sound like science fiction? It's not. One such product, the
Himawari, has been commercially available for nearly 15 years
http://www.sun-tek.com/Docs/ArticleDaylighting.ht
Slashdot: 20-year-old news for nerds. Sigh.
Not to bash this solar lighting system or anything, but the author of the article is a bit of a nutcase-- she wrote a whole article about how we're all doomed because of the impending Magnetic Field Revesal, and another article about a scientist was killed in a conspiratorial fashion because of his "new energy" discoveries, which apparently came from space aliens.
So take this article with a big grain of alien-free salt.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
The article specifically says that it does:
As for the solar panels, I would think that they'd be a lot more expensive. (Disclaimer: I haven't actually checked.) The systems I've seen require large banks of batteries to store power, and there are a lot of expensive system components.
One nice thing about solar lighting is that there's really not much else other than a mirror and a bunch of fiber optic cables. It's a pretty simple system made of relatively cheap parts.
Also, one of the selling points of the company's Web site is that the lighting is all natural, not artificial, which is supposedly preferable for happy attitudes and such.
Of course, not having any lights at night or on cloudy days would totally suck. The article mentions that the system can be integrated with supplimental artifical lighting. Perhaps a combination of solar panels and solar lighting would be the best system if one wants cheap, eco-friendly lighting that is also mostly natural for happy attitudes.
Errr, wait a minute, something's not right here. First we build a structure- wind, quake, water, sun, (and even fire)-proof, then we build another gadget to bring the sun into our buildings. I'm no architect, but the buildings we can see all around us are convincing proof that we can ensure natural sunlight reaches most parts of the interior of our buildings - we have sun roofs, open areas, North facing buildings (in the Southern hemisphere), even simple windows.
This gadget is just a bunch of boys' toy, and will be forgotten in a few years. I suggest we pay more attention to the architects who are building our environments to ensure we never need such devices in the first place. A bit of design in the beginning saves plenty of effort later. For example, you won't need to crack your brains figuring out safety regulations, building codes and installation hassles for a fibre optics light and heat guide...
Imagine, skylights on every floor! :-)
Of course, there'd be extended coffee breaks for those total solar eclipses...
I don't see how this would save money at night unless the dish can get solar energy no matter what the time is. Perhaps if your a geek that lives in a leaky basement all day this would help you, assuming you even want light.
Maybe I'm just not reading TFA.
This would be fantastic for lighting the insides of Arcologies. Something I've always thought was a big negative for city sized buildings is whereas you have a huge volume for everything you have relatively less surface area for windows, and as someone else posted here lack of natural light can be really bad for you... in a large-sized arcology you'd have huge sections with no windows...
Just a random thought on an application.
"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."
At 1.98892 × 10^30 kilograms these "fiber optic" dudes better get started now!
There is truth in humor.
I've been looking for a way to risk skin cancer indoors, and windows are so dependent on direction.
In all seriousness though, I'm sure they filter out the harmful UV rays. Maybe it would help if I RTFA.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
Says "Increases Productivity" and "Increase Sales"
How does light do that?
Is it cover by their warranty?
http://www.sunlight-direct.com/warranty.html
That's just more ransom money in my pocket when I complete my sun-blocking machine...
This was posted on Slashdot a few weeks ago.
And many posters (including me) pointed out that sun pipes have been around a long time.
i want to replace my 2x 1000watt hps lights with this system.... will i still get a good yeald?
Here's the homepage of the Japanese company that did this almost 20 years ago:
http://www.himawari-net.co.jp/e_page-index01.html
I suremise that such a system is cost prohibitive for home use. If it was practical and even moderatly expensive someone would be sellign them already instead of three decades of Beta testing. Sure you can get cheapo sun tubes but they don't put out much light and aren't usable just anywhere becasue of limitations of distance between the roof opening and the interior ceiling and the number of bends/reflectors required.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
It was called "windows" before.
Mundus Vult Decipi
The main benefit would be the lessened heat dissipation. I've been in far too many elevators that have what seems like way too many incandescents in the roof that make the elevator very hot, especially this time of year.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Are these assclowns talking about a clock ? That's all you need to track the sun.
dont look into LED with the remaining good eye...
Looking at my latest electricity bill, I'm charged 13 cents (Australian, roughly) per kilowatt hour. Ten dollars is 77 kilowatt hours; that's equivalent to running one of those things for 5,000 hours (again, roughly).
Working period is 8 hours a day, five days a week -- forty hours a week. 5,000 hours is therefore 125 weeks, or about two and a half years. Multiply that figure by the number of square feet a standard bulb can illuminate (it'd be, what, about 50 square feet at a guess?), and you have a break-even point of 125 years.
If they're replacing incandescent bulbs (which use four times the electricity), break even comes down to about 30 years.
Points to consider:
- My pricing for electricity is residential rates. Industrial and commercial rates are probably different. Anybody have solid figures?
- I'm guessing with the 50 square feet per bulb. If a bulb can light more area, the time to breakeven increases accordingly. If less, it decreases.
- Businesses typically use fluorescent tubes, not bulb replacements. I don't know how much energy those use, nor how much area they can light.
- Does this price include installation? If not, there's an added expense before break even is reached.
- You'll also need other lighting to supplement this system on badly overcast days, and at night, reducing the payoff.
The price will have to drop a bit based upon my back-of-the-envelope calculations before this becomes viable. If anybody has better figures than the ones I've given, please, speak up -- I'm genuinely curious. In particular, I don't know how much electricity costs a business in the USA; that is the single biggest factor in determining payoff time.Why would they need GPS tracking? It's not like the building is going to move. I suppose they are using the time/date signal to compute where point the dish. Good luck fumbling around in the dark when the military scrambles the GPS in response to a terrorist threat though. Why don't they simply use a set of phototransistors instead, no computing required?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
The GPS-based sun-tracking mechanism uses very little energy.
Bah, that's nothing. I've designed a similar system and my sunflower-based sun-tracking mechanism uses even less energy! None at all in fact, other than a little bit of water. And these guys think they're environmentally conscious, hah!
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
See Snopes.com
What really happened is that Fischer developed the space skylight at its own expense and gave it to NASA for free.
I wonder if these fiber optic roofs will allow people (spy satellites?) to see inside a room when the luminosity inside the room is higher than that outside. Think of it like peering into a house's front windows at night -- as long as the living room lights are on, you can see in, but they can't see out.
ASU's Hayden library has used solar collectors and fiber optic distribution for over 15 years.. what gives?
This is sorta off topic, but that comment reminded me of a book I read one time in which the main character had a shed in his yard that would slow time way down for anyone who was in it. So he spent like a year in it but only one day had passed in the real world. I remember he did lots of working out while he was in there and when he came out his older brother was pissed =). Anybody happen to know what that was called?
a)the earth's magnetic field does reverse every so often, b)we're overdue (by a huge margin) and c)we probably would be slightly fucked, because during the flip, we'd have no protection from cosmic and solar radiation.
NOVA
Wikipedia Article on Geomagnetic Reversal
As for the aliens- yep, she's off her rocker on that one, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Please help metamoderate.
wtf? MOD PARENT FUNNY rofl
When I toured the labs in University of British Columbia a few months ago, a person showed us his doctine thesis experiment that center on tunneling sunlight with the help of special reflective (from 3M) tunnels that is over 65% efficient.
Other than the addition of the outrageous "dish" (on shark?), tell me why this is "new".
Maybe the guy paid the slashdot mods to let his ad be published...
This isn't groundbreaking. There have been building materials developed before that use fibers to transmit light from outside. I'm a bigger fan of just designing the building so that more natural light finds its way in, rather than resorting to expensive materials and tricks. Windows do an OK job when positioned intelligently. I remember visiting an apartment building in Norwich which had a brilliant design, sunlight made it down columns to each floor and there was plenty natural lighting in the hallways. Amazed me
sorry I couldn't see it on maps.google - probably due to the buildings all being underground :)
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
i'd say that's a bit overkill on the technology. you could use photoresistors and comparators to do the same thing for much less money and independantly of gps coverage (which should be no problem, i'm just saying)
Install some glass windows and skylights. More sunlight for a fraction of the price. Want to be able to turn it off? Just install some blinds.
As someone who spends all day working in a bunker for security reasons (read: no windows), I think this would be sweet. Of course, the obvious problem is immediately apparent. If it was possible to include a one-way mirror in the optics, it would make life more enjoyable. Of course, nothing this complicated would ever get past the security folks but I can dream...
Now, could we forgoe pwoered light entirely by laying transatlantic cables...now China can even export light to the US!
Building a healthy future; Connecting communities
As someone who spends all day working in a bunker for security reasons
Read:
As someone who lives in my parents' basement for reasons of financial security
Of course, nothing this complicated would ever get past the security folks but I can dream...
Read:
Of course, this is too complicated for my parents to understand, not to mention too expensive, so it'll never get past the folks.
What reason could you possibly have for using GPS to track the damned sun?
Three or four photosensors and a PIC 12 could do the same thing at a cost of about a dollar. Hell, you could skip the micro and do it all in hardware for probably 50 cents. If you must assume the person installing it is too bloody stupid to adjust the angle of the device to allow for one-axis tracking (see Equatorial Mount), then it would be more like 9 or 16 sensors in a dome pattern. STILL about a hundred times cheaper than the cheapest GPS-on-a-chip system (plus the code one would have to write to make it work).
Personally, I avoid buying things that make me seriously question the sanity of those who are selling it.
And: WHY THE HELL WAS THIS POSTED!? Come on, this is so not new anything.
Not one comment about cannibus cultivation using this system? My you'all really are a bunch of nerds. Many cultivators are caught by an analysis of the amount of electricity needed to recreate sunlight in places where the plants being grown by this artificial sunlight can never be exposed to casual public view.
But a light pipe that can channel sunlight from the solar tower to underground growing chamber without showing up on the computerized electricity bills? Something new under the sun!
Now we need a truly innovative way to store sunlight. The light capacitor. And while we're mixing up brains, we also need a way to use sunlight to seperate salt from water and to serperate water molecules into storable hydrogen and oxygen.
But, hey, one step at a time. And this is a cool step.
How the heck would you beta test this. One would think that it would leave you office in shambles, and could it crash your whole office?
I could swear I remember a TV news report from the late 80s early 90s where this was being done in one of the new skyscrapers in Japan.
What are the implications of doing this? Other than breaking every code setup by neighborhoods and subdivisions. Seems like it would keep a home cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. I guess it would be difficult to mow.
Or you could just blast a hole in the wall or something. Of course, I'm pretty sure it would be a bad idea to bring the sun indoors. Even if you could fit it, you'd incinerate everything around you. Plus other nasty side effect.
I like my artificial light! :(
You know, using thermonuclear fusion to desalinize water in oceans and use it for watering agricultural terrains is pretty old too. It's called rain.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
... tomorrow will be a cloudy day for all u solar light buildings you get the day off!... for every one else not in the stone age work is still on...
(yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
Didn't they do this kind of thing in The Man With The Golden Gun? I believe their name for the GPS guidence system was a Solex Agitator.
I cannot attest to the length that Hayden Library has used these, but I can vouch for their existence. It's been about 4 years since I was there last, but I do remember their presence.
What is your penile percentile?
Maybe they put a GPS receiver and a huge radio transmitter on the sun, so that the sun can relay its location to earth... Oh wait, no, that wouldn't work...
:)
It's a mystery. It's not like it is difficult to determine the approximate direction of the most intensive light source (which should be the only positioning the dish would need).
I blame marketing
I'm sure I've read about fiber-optic light distribution at least twenty years ago in Popular Science or Popular Mechanics.
Sounds like this writer didn't do any research.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Anyone who has read Dilbert knows that management doesn't want productive workers. They want drones. And one of the best ways to ensure zombie-like submission is to completely eliminate natural light. It's why there are no windows in most office buildings.
Isn't a GPS overkill for this? How about an array of three photocells aimed slightly differently on the X and Y axis to tell the dish to move towards the greater amount of light?
Btw, it's not (just) the UV I'd want to filter. While indoor all-over tanning in complete privacy might be nice, I'd be more interested in filtering out heat in the summer, and allowing it in during the Winter.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...I see with this system, that wasn't mentioned before, is that it would only work as long as there are no clouds. You can't concentrate diffuse light with a parabolic mirror.
Really? Where? I've worked here more than 10 years, and I have yet to see it. I know they replaced all the dual 40W flourescent tubes with single 32W 277V fixtures last year, but I haven't seen any solar lighting.
;)That "skylight" brings in about almost zero extra light into the building. In fact, they leave the four high-intensity mercury vapor lights that point into the nipple on 24x7 so it doesn't look so dismal during the day.
Surely you aren't refering to the fake decorative solar panels that point at the Nipple of Knowledge, are you?
But maybe I'm missing something...
If Star Trek had the internet: Captain, we've received an IM from the romulans. "Surrender or be destroyed. LOL. o.O"
Even when I just had a view of the company generator and a few pigeons, it was better than any diffuse piped light source could ever be. The problem being "solved" here is a fault of US corporate culture that will eventually go away of its own accord when gigantic buildings with dark interiors go out of fashion.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
The designers will have a serious laugh off you all suggesting that the GPS is unnecessary and over-the-top, if a huge asteroid strikes Earth, tilts it by some 30 degrees off its original axis and the devices will just readjust themselves for new location and continue to function ;D
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I am not an architect, but my wife and a number of her friends are.
... not even my wife :(
They agree that windows, solar pipes, sky lights, open floors and buidling facings are important methods to increase natural light but they also could see where this system and others that are similar would be useful.
So to those of you who think that this is merely a gadget and should be regulated to the garbage heap soon, please consider industrial, retail, office and other large area and/or multi-floor buildings. None of the architects I talked with would consider them for single family houses yet
My wife and her collegues and friends like these systems but, like others here on slashdot they are curious as to the cost benifit.
Isn't using GPS for sun tracking just a tad over-engineered? Why not just track the big bright thing in the sky using simple optical sensors? And if it's too cloudy to get a good fix on the sun, well, the system isn't going to do you any good anyway...
This is perfect!
And when the night comes and the moon is smiling - We can all have some Moonshining!
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
I edited a corporate video about a product like this about FIVE YEARS AGO, and I'll bet it wasn't new then.
It's called a window.
Cite: "The collector tracks the sun using a microprocessor-based controller that accurately calculates the position of the sun given the local GPS coordinates and the local time."
So there is no GPS device in the collector. They simply enter the coordinates.
Surely a simple tube with a highly-reflective interior surface would work just as well as fibre optics, and more cheaply? After all, that's what happens in a fibre ..... the light cannot escape through the walls of the fibre because it would end up coming out at an impossible angle {Snell's law says that sin i / sin r = the refractive index of the material, where i is the angle between light and an imaginary perpendicular on the outside and r the same thing on the inside, but the sine of an angle can never be bigger than 1}, so it just bounces off the walls instead till it gets to the other end. So why not just use an actual mirror? As a bonus, you can even use the tube as a ventilation duct.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
You may be unprotected, but I've got my tinfoil hat!
1729 = 9^3 + 10^3 = 1^3 + 12^3
Some bozo got a dictate from head office to stop using Windows and go with an alternative, they got a bit confused.
Expect the next study to show that using open source fibre optics has a higher TCO than Windows.
The surface temperature of the Sun is 6000 celcius, do we really want to bring it in to our offices? I mean, 1: it is hot, 2: it won't fit through the door, even if you unlock that side door partition which is really annoying 3: The gravitations forces would rip apart this planet, but not before it was vaporised into a little puff of dirty steam.
So, all in all, I could say keep the sun outside, and the pale white geeks inside.
RTF-what?
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
nevermind clouds and winters - pollen and birds would be the biggest problem where I work. the mirror will have to be cleaned at least every other week!
on an unrelated note, if I were to have such a thing in my bedroom, I would actually want the IR part of the spectrum.
Guess this is not exacly news.
I used to work for a company in Brazil, called Cia do Sol (tarnslates to Sun Company), were we made illumination simulation using Radiance and did internal illumination usign fiber. The capture spot would capture sunlight and follow the sun, and if there was not enough light, lamps would also be used.
For me it looks about the same approach, and I left the company in 98/99!
-- SouNerd.com
The collector mirror... you guessed it, a big ugly satellite dish that he bartered to have chrome plated, and a DIY sun tracking system that is powered by the sunlight it tracks!. The system provides more than enough light to light up his place, though it is a bit weird when clouds pass overhead.
At night and on stormy days he uses stored energy from solar panels. He used to use a 12 volt system, now he uses compact fluorescent bulbs and inverters. His entire nightime lighting system (every light in the house) uses less than 300 watts, where before he calculated it to use almost 800.
This system sounds remarkably like one I saw at the San Diego Sea World twenty years ago. In the Sea World system a sun tracking solar collector was used to focus sunlight on a fiber optic bundle that piped light too exhibits inside a building.
One of my dreams has been to have a domed or recessed ceiling that is painted dark dark blue, with sidelights, and have a star pattern of light pipes installed. Multiple fibres to change what's visible and what's not as time goes on.
Problem is, fibres themselves cost way in excess of 2000$ to do... so now I'm contemplating micro LEDs...
I suggest you read up on solar cells. Efficiency is currently more than 10% even for the standard off the shelf cells and efficiencies of the order 25-30% are possible in the lab. OK, so that is not brilliant, but being able to get 300W from every square meter of roof space would be more than sufficient for most buildings that have a couple of storeys. There is also the possibility of applying solar cells as cladding to a building, so that perhaps even multistorey buildings could make the most of solar power.
$8k will install at least a 2KW system.
And that's from a licensed dealer who's making money hand over fist as the panels can be had for around 600$, the connection equipment and batteries add up.
Now lets reject the IR into a water-tube to capture that as surplus energy too and we've got a better system that costs less...
With something like that, people can grow marijuana without huge electrical bills to get them snagged by the authorities. But I guess there would be that one poor bastard who puts a dozen units on his roof....
Hippies and back to earth people have been using this stuff for years. It makes perfect sense in a place where you get lots of sun already, and it improves mood.
Otherwise known as a sun blossom.
I always thought fiber optics were very expensive. Wouldn't the up front cost outweigh the savings for a lot of people? Admittedly, I don't know anything about fiber optics so hopefully a reader can answer that one for me.
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
cut on heat emissions by incandescent What about the heat from the sunlight itself? Instead of getting a little warm in your office from incandescent lighting (like there's a lot of offices with that) you can feel like you are sitting inside an EZ-Bake oven instead. Ahh but the heat is a natural heat I guess...
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Japan has had this in production for years.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Why is a company that chooses not to filter UV any more liable than a government that chooses not to install a giant pair of Oakley sunglasses over the entire U.S.?
Thats up to the jury. Its much more likely that you will win a case against a company vs the government, so the company is more liable.
Speaking of which, TFA seems contradictory in this respect. First it says:
Since traditional artificial-light tubes and bulbs emit heat as well as visible light, the use of fiber-optic direct lighting will actually lessen the amount of energy that has to be expended on air conditioning, diminishing the strain on the grid.
Which clearly implies this technology is supposed to emit less heat than bulbs and tubes. But then, later it says:
Given that the visual light from even one fiber is capable of boiling water, there might be a fire hazard from broken fibers if the work is incorrectly or carelessly done, or if a later home renovator were to cut across the installed fibers.
So I thought, well, it might take some time to boil that water they mentioned, but it's a fire hazard as well? That doesn't sound like it's quite as cool as they were implying earlier (especially the title: "Cool Light on Hot Days").
Why did they use an Alt-Az tracking base when an equitorial tracking setup would have been better. After all, right ascension rules.
On their products page they give a few items, but they are all listed as "System Available for Beta-Testing Only". Not exactly designed to inspire confidence.
1. Get a product into beta.
2. Distribute it as a beta, with no warranty.
3. ********
4. Profit!
Just becasue it works for Google doesn't mean it will work with anything.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
We're all fat, pasty, Cheeto-crumb-covered douchebags sitting in our parents' dark basements in front of cobbled-together crap-puters while we pretend to be Apple fanbois on slashdot. Neither sunlight nor water has graced our clammy, foul-smelling skin that holds in our stinking innards like some sort of fucked-up sausage. This invention has about as much use and appeal to us slashdotters as a toothbrush and toothpaste.
and for YEARS the government has stopped things from being marketed simply because of how it could destroy the economy.. i say fuck the electrical companies.. surely some people will be out of jobs, but its a small sacrafice for the millions out there that require this kind of technology. glad to see this is becoming more of a wide spread interest..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
It's called a window people. It magically transmits light from outside to inside.
I have to work in the basement of a building with no windows. We call it the dungeon. I'd love to have real light! This could change the way offices are built. Of course we'd need some lawsuits to get companies to spend the money. I think its possible since other structures are required to have windows like college dorm rooms and apartments. I spend 9 hours a day at work including lunch.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
The only problem with this device is the cost. I'm sure it's insanely expensive, especially since they don't give a price on the site you have to request one! Although it does sound like a good idea. http://www.kunae.blogspot.com/
Specific heat of water: 4186 J/kg.K .25 kg (250 ml, ignore density change due to coffee)
Cup of coffee:
Energy in sunlight: 800 W/m.m (valid for noon in low latitudes on a sunny day)
Collection area: 1.17 m.m (actually 1.17 but I'm not doing the numbers again).
"several minutes" to boil a cup of coffee: 3 min
Assuming 100% efficiency, and using 50% of the fibers, that gives us 80K, or exactly what you need to go from 20C to 100C. Unfortunately, I don't think my assumptions about the energy in sunlight, efficiencies, or the percentage of fibers being used are very reasonable (I'd guess that I'm off by an order of magnitude or so overall).
The article made a lot of sense up until it went right off the rails when the author started babbling about using the sunlight to power everything in your kitchen.
The Japanese have been doing this since the early 1990's. They developed motorized sun-tracking mirrored devices to collect natural sunlight on the rooftops of buildings and use fiber optics to transmit the light inside. They studied the effects of lighting on productivity and found that natural sunlight was the best.
This technology is not new. The US finally caught up to Japan on one single technology from 15 years ago. Yay. Nothing to see here, move on.
So exclusive that it was on Discovery about 6 months ago.
/. People word stories falsely just so it gets posted.
/. cliches, think on this: If the most important thing to you, what really makes your day, is getting a story on Slashdot, take my advice and get out more. Human interaction can be interesting and entertaining, and will probably be a whole lot more satisfying than sitting in your parents basement spanking to the Victorias Secret catelog.
God I hate
And before the obligatory -- "If you dont like it then leave (followed by some comment about market economies)" or "Linux Roxorz" or "Free beer vs. Free speech" or "your spelling and/or grammar sucks" or any number of other
On the beneficial side this could allow the growth of farm product inside a controlled environment say in a basement.
On the not so beneficial side this could allow illegal substances to be grown inside and reduce the amount of radiation the structure would normally give off with traditional lighting methods. That radiation is how most of these places are found.
Could something like this be used as a link for remote solar panel storage? like storing the panel itself in building or undergroung with the fiber connecting it to the real light, a few yards or even miles away?
"Just tell em Large Marge sent ya." -Large Marge, (the Ghost)
This will revolutionize the homegrowing scene!
I saw this exact product - minus the GPS pointing collector - in 1985.
The only difference is that the collector was a 2 foot dome on the roof or wall of the house.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
If you want more natural light in your life, move to Canada. Seriously.
/plug
During the winter you're at work for almost all (depending on where you live) the daylight hours anyway, so that fact that you're at work for ALL the daylight hours isn't much of a stretch. Spend your lunch time sitting in front of a big window. If you're on the praries (like I am) it's chronically sunny and clear so chances are the sun will be out and shining. (Thank you to whoever thought of making my home one of the sunniest spots on earth... excepting actual deserts).
In the summer though is when you reap the real benefits. The sun rises at 5:20 in the morning on the longest day of the year, and sets at 9:41. Although the light is usable enough, and doesn't get really dark until 11:30, and starts getting light again just after 3am. We're not quite far enough north that we don't get real darkness at night, but if you're tired of not getting enough light in the evenings during the summer, come visit us. And if you're worried about the cold, on really hot days it gets up to 100 fahrenheit, not quite 40 celcius, and is usually a comfortable 75-80 fahrenheit or about 25 celcius.
I won't comment on winter temperatures, personally I prefer hurt-your-lungs searingly crisp cold over extreme heat any day.
This is not a sig.
I'm going to wait for wireless sunlight...
to change a light bulb? ...
Felt Better! Big headache is gone.
I think I saw very similar technology on the American TV Show "That's Incredible" about 20 years ago. It was something being tried out in Japan, with a large solar dish called a "sunflower" and fiber optics meant to bring sunlight into tiny offices.
Q: Why is it that people think a technology didn't exist until they come in contact with it???
Example: Linux is reverse engineered UNIX, not a new OS from scratch. However, Linux IS the most popular flavor of UNIX (so far), which is no small accomplishment.
I know slashdotters don't usually like anything based upon windows, but isn't kind of silly to use fiber optics when a pane or two of glass will do.
Or just install a light-sensor at about every 15-degrees and rotate towards the greatest source of light...
That the entire lifecycle of many plants were dependant on the honey bee
I learned that as well.
But it ain't true, because what you and I call Honeybees are usally "European Honeybees". The first colonists brought them over from Europe.
Honeybees were introduced to California sometime around 1850.
Before the introduction of the Honeybee, plants still had plenty of pollinators-- other kinds of bees, flys, butterflies, etc.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Maybe not to the level they are now, but the Japanese were doing this 10+ years ago.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
This idea has been used for centuries. Older ships used to have prism-like crystals embedded throughout the upper deck which would transmit light down to the lower levels without the need for candles.
I actually saw an installation of this fiber optic lighting several years ago, though I can't remeber where.
What's new about this? I saw this on an episode of PM Magazine in like 1980 or something... They did it for small windowless offices in Tokyo.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
I could pipe the sun from the top of one of the hills
to the pool for a few extra hours of sun-swimming fun!
Or maybe I can't. Guess I need some scrilla first.
The UK is overcast like 80% of the year.
I am unsure why, but they weren't extremely popular and when the electric light became common, they were "forgotten".
I read about the history of them a number of years ago and considered installing them in my own home. The pricing was to expensive then and there just isn't enough money at this moment to get it done.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Did you actually read the Wikipedia article? It does mention a 28% efficiency under the "exotic materials" category, with the qualification that the material in question is "prohibitively expensive." The rest of the article indicates efficiencies almost exactly around 10%, with one reaching as high as... *gasp* 14%. I love it when people here on /. want so badly to post something that they totally ignore the point of whatever information they're providing. In this case, the article bobbis.u links to in order to makes it very clear that most anything that you can buy or build is around 10%. Go bother somebody else, child.
Lighting Applications -
... ahh... herbal 'chemotherapy' treatments...
For all the slash dotters growing hybrid antibiotic tomatoes in their basement,
or
how useful is this going to be at night?
Good karma sticks to me like velcro on a piece of plexiglass.
Move along, citizen.
For reef aquarium hobbyists this is a very desirable thing. Currently, hobbyists spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on high intensity Metal Halide and high output fluorescent systems that do a fair job of replicating tropical sunlight.
This highly inefficient technology also packs a extra costs. The lighting on my reef aquarium accounts for possibly half of my entire electricity bill. Every six months I spend close to $180 on bulb replacements, as bulbs lose their intensity and correct color spectrum with age.
Piping direct sunlight into the tank would certainly have benefits, not only on the budget, but for the organisms inside. It's long been argued in the reef hobbyist circles that the organisms we keep benefit from cyclic changes in lighting over the course of the day. My aquarium seems to benefit from lower light levels in the morning, reaching full intensity midday, tapering off to lower lighting in the evening. Having the sun do this for me would be nice, though I'd likely have to supplement what the sun brought to compensate for my non-tropical location on the hemisphere in the winter, and taper off the natural light in the summer to better replicate tropical light cycles.
Most intriguing to me (as I run the AC in my house and run the aquarium water through a chiller to keep the temps from going too high) is the fact that, if I had one of these pipes point 50k lumens to my aquarium, is that I'd be drastically reducing the heat directed to my tank. I could lose the fans pushing the hot air away from the top of my tank, and not have to cool the entire house when it's only 80 outside.
I'd expect that if a home user model comes out, it'll be gobbled up by hard core reef aquarium enthusiasts like myself, even if the initial costs are high.
Yes, this was posted a while back. I came across the company while browsing on Engadget. Very cool application for lighting basements or office buildings during the day. I am all for this. I can see this taking off.
From their FAQ:
Q. Can I turn the collected sunlight off?
A. Yes. A switch is provided
One of my brothers went to work in Delhi for a year at the Indian Express. As the only 'Merkin on staff, he spent a lot of time trying to explain some of the cultural background behind stories coming off the AP wire from the US. One such story was about born-again Christians.
After explaining this, an older curmudgeonly Hindi fellow piped up: "We Hindu believe that _all_ Christians are born again, and again, and again."
Just install a magical peice of equipment that came into being as soon as perminant structures came into being. This magical device actually lets you see outside, in addition to providing you sunlight. YOu can also moniter the weather, and this device also serves as climate control. This magical device is called a WINDOW. What a novel idea, huh?
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
What we really need to do is ask our local Ministries of Magic (or comparable branches of government) if they will please break decorrum and give us some enchanted windows for our office buildings. Then if we muggles are really super nice to the wizarding population (when we can identify them), Magical Maintenance may just give us beautiful sun-shiny days all year long!
But one day Tom, he went and caught the River-daughter, in green gown, flowing hair, sitting in the rushes
The idea is not realistic because of the follwing.
1. During the day, we don't need light and there is sunlight. But when we need light during night, there is not sunlight.
2. If it is cloudy, we need light, but no sunlight.
3. The cost to buy the equipment and setup may be another reason for reevaluating the idea.
It couldn't be plastic, but how many lumens do you want to cook? ;)
My job involves lighting, and I have seen this technology for a couple of years, however it does have its problems. The obvious problem being that when it is dark or overcast you get little or nothing, remember this is not a solar generator so you do not have the option to charge a battery with it. The second and slightly less obvious problem is snow. If snow builds up on the thing you also get nothing.. Its a good idea for a supplimentary system, however in a home you can usually achieve the same with carefull planning of window locations and skylights.
As a secondary system I think it is a bit moot. there are better generator and solar options available, and in the doomsday scenerio the article paints, you will have bigger problems than light in your kitchen.
Since the system blocks out UV and IR light, why not point the UV at some photovoltaic cells, and the IR at a solar water heater? No point in letting that energy go to waste.
"This quote is a product of the Frobozz Magic Quote Company."
I burn to a crisp if I even see sunlight, but I've never, ever, ever gotten a tan or a burn through glass in the car or anywhere else.
Flourescent lamps depend on the plain-jane glass envelope to block the huge amounts of UV the arc inside makes. Tanning lamps are made with special quartz glass that does transmit UV.
Isn't it possible that you took a long trip in the car, got the tan at your destination, then came home and noticed the tan there?
Can only light up fixtures which are on the top floor of the building and within 20 feet of the collector.
Uses moving parts
Very poor solution.
Come back and talk to me when:
#1 uses a flat prismatic surface
(Think sheets of Nano-sized fresnel structures)
#2 no moving parts
(hint - its done with mirrors!)
#3 can use almost entire surface of building
(why only use top of building? Only exempt the windows!)
#4 can transmit light to fixtures 80 floors away with low loss.
(Now your talking major Urban deplaoyment!, even a 60 story building with underground parking garage gets lit!)
Satellite-dish like structure, requires moving parts, tracks sun to keep optical focus point on light collector which routes sunlight into plastic
fibers, which can only transmit light to "fixtures which should lie within a 20 foot radius circle centered on the solar collector mount." And those fixtures can only be on the top floor of the building.
Here is a thought....
were ever there is day somewere is night