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Pumping Sunlight Into Homes
ByronScott sends a snippet from Inhabitat that begins "What if you could light your entire building using no electricity or artificial lights – but just the natural light from our favorite star, the Sun? Enter the Sundolier, a powerful sunlight transport system that's like putting a solar robot on your roof to pump sunlight indoors. The manufacturer claims a single Sundolier unit can provide enough light to illuminate a 1,000-2,500 sq. ft. area [93-232 sq. m] without any other sources." The company's website is a bit thin on details, such as what happens on cloudy days, or how many days of sunlight per year on average are needed for the device to perform acceptably.
only downside, it doesnt work when it's needed most, namely AT NIGHT, when it's dark.
That's not a bug.....it's a feature.
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Don't know about you but I am not rich. Look at the fabrication work on that thing. For starters what do you do when the rain hits the reflectors. Water spots and wind blown dirt won't effect the performance of the reflector assembly in a detrimental way. I am sure that the proud owners will not mind in the least climbing up on the roof and cleaning the reflectors and admittance windows. Should be fun on a 12/12 pitch roof install. Dual tracking motors, those are really reliable and will never fail in service. The sun tracker and electronics should last for ever as well. There is no way that this thing is anywhere near a reasonable price. All that stainless steel and special assemblies. Don't get me wrong, it is a beautifully crafted device from the pictures but the fabrication is gonna be stupid expensive. They are not going to give it away. Another rich mans folly.
Increase the speed of learning
Directly impact student performance
Improve student behavior
Recruit the best teachers who seek the best environments
Highest quality light = highest quality learning environment
The Heschong Mahone Group analyzed test scores of over 21,000 students in multiple school districts. The study showed that students with the most daylighting in their classrooms progressed 20% faster on math tests and 26% faster on reading tests when compared to students in the least daylit classrooms. Heschong Mahone Group, "Daylighting in Schools" Report at www.h-w-g.com, 1999.
In a North Carolina Performance Report, students attending daylit schools outperformed the students in non-daylit schools by 5%-14%. National Renewable Energy Laboratory Report, " Daylighting in Schools: Improving Student Performance and Health at a Price Schools can Afford, " 2000.
A National Renewable Energy Laboratory Report concluded that students benefit from daylighting, both in terms of increased performance and general health and well being. National Renewable Energy Laboratory Report, "Daylighting in Schools: Improving Student Performance and Health at a Price Schools can Afford, " 2000.
Wow ... "increase the speed of learning?". Given crackpotery on their site, the poor science, the ridiculous claims that instead of focusing on fucking light delivered, focus on subjective, unmeasurable bullshit, the complete lack of details, video, specs, etc. this product doesn't sound very serious ...
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
This has lots of interesting uses, but homes are not generally the primary market. Light pipes are most useful for businesses. You want to build a big office building to minimize cost, which means that not everybody can have a window office. So what do you do? You put in light pipes so that you can significantly reduce your energy costs and significantly improve worker health and morale.
Same principal applies to apartment buildings, hotels, etc. Imagine a sun deck with outdoor-style gardens at ground level in a 20-story hotel. Imagine cutting the lighting bill for an entire office building (including interior rooms) to zero almost every day. And so on.
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Or a less fancy version. The article says
The concentrated light is then reflected down a two foot tube and distributed using a “sun chandelier”.
Fiberoptics would allow you to snake light to various rooms, into basements, etc. That seems more useful.
Right, exactly. The use cases on the website are even all things like offices, schools, the kinds of places that aren't inhabited at night.
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However they all suffer from the same drawbacks. You want lighting when it's dark - not (just) during the day, so you still have to install conventional lighting too. Plus they aren't so good when it's cloudy. They also pump in all the solar heat as well as the light so you use more energy than you save cooling the place down.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I'm pretty sure if the electric wiring in your house is burning to the point of causing you problems with toxic fumes, you've got quite a bit more to worry about.
Air is cheaper than plastic or glass.
Glass fiber-optics means:
-more light for less heat
-longer lasting
-easier installation
-never having to MacGyver a device to clean a dirty tube (with turns!)
Any kind of fiberoptic transfer for the collected light is also going to be so expensive as to be effectively unworkable.
There are already a number of consumer level manufacturers in the market. The prices are high but this is not due to any inherit cost in fiber optics. The problem is there is no low grade fiber optic market.
Glass fiber-optic solar collectors/directors/diffusers have great potential for cost/energy/environmental savings but to realize that some company is going to have to plunk down a nontrivial investment in fiber-optics manufacturing solely for the solar industry.
Poor guy can't even go live in a cave, due to the threat of Radon. Seriously, if someone is that worried about the toxins in their house they should open their window and exchange them for the toxins outside their house.