Slashdot Mirror
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.
I've wondered for years why nobody made something like this... (Or have they, and I just didn't know about it?)
Seems like a "well, duh" kind of device. Add a combiner with a high-efficiency, natural-spectrum, high-lumens-output light, and you'd only need one light source for the whole house. (As in: Just inside the house roof, you add a very-high-output, but dimmable, light so that at night, you get light through the same system. Obviously, for redundancy sake, you'd want more than one bulb in there, and you'd still want to have secondary lights throughout the house.)
There was a story by Bradbury (sorry slow internet here don't want to look it up) where they had "picture" windows made of glass(?) with an extremely(!) high index of refraction. These windows had been left out in some scenic location (African savannah) and because the velocity of light was so slow through the glass, it would take years for the light to get through! Thus a "perfect" 3D display of whatever the window had been exposed to.
Sounds (extremely) farfetched but in "light" (ha ha) of the discovery of a method to slow down or even stop light (admittedly in a Bose-Einstein condescent in a near perfect vacuum just above absolute zero), it is not entirely fantasy. Not entirely.
> Wow ... "increase the speed of learning?"
Actually that is an important point. Most artificial light is so poor that it hinders whatever you try to do. It is well known how to produce better lighting, but it is just not done. When was the last time you experienced lighting that can adjust the color temperature, for example? That is quite an essential feature to keep your day rhythm working properly, and it has been shown to improve learning results significantly.
When I had a house built back in 1998, "Solatube" lighting was one of the build options. From this pictures, this looks like the same thing with a slightly different input lens for a system like this:
http://www.solatube.com/residential/product-catalog/brighten-up-series/index.php
I bought one to brighten a dark bathroom. It was nice. pretty much the same effect as a skylight, but it worked even where there was an attic in the way that would make a standard skylight unworkable.
I play Nerd-Folk!
Considering it's for blunt transfer of light I think the fiber version might be cheaper too since you could basically make it out of the cheapest still-transmitting rejected cables.
I'm not sure how much the cheapest functional cable for this is though, or how flexible, although the real trick would be getting the light into the fiber-optics to begin with. Some kind of half-pipe and tube-collector design both capable of just being hosed down by a home user is obviously the best solution but probably also expensive or impossible.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Sweet a hypochondriac geek.
If you are worrying about the tiny bit of VOC's from your houses wiring, then I better not tell you about what your carpet and the wood in your house is outgassing. or the paint on the walls (yes even the "enviro-junk" they sell to try and placate people like you).
The wiring puts out far FAR less than many other sources in a home even a LEEDS certified green home. Natural woods gas out nasties if you want to go looking for nasties.
Oh and dont get me started about the impurity of the gypsum in your wall board.....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This idea is not new at all... I used to work for a company that holds the original patents on this type of technology (http://www.solatube.com/), and has making these types of things since the 80s. Their product was far less obtrusive, and from the inside looked a recessed can-light, and not the transporter deck from the star ship Enterprise. Their overall luminosity was far greater too, and multiple warehouses and factory floors already use this tech. The technology around carrying light through a tubular structure has become pretty efficient, however the size of the roof perforation and the overall ability of the light to turn sharp corners are the big problem. It's basically impossible to feed these things through walls and reach a second floor. Instead, you have go straight down. There is however another company that already came up with the idea of using a solar dish to track light, only, they did it much much much more intelligently. http://www.sunlight-direct.com/ With fiber optics, they can scale down the size of the perforations, go much further distances, and make the lights much less obtrusive. They can even make 90 degree turns (or 180 degree, or 490 degrees if you really wanted too....) with virtually no loss of light. Just stating the obvious...
This is a problem much more easily solved by placing miniature nuclear power plants on peoples homes to generate electricity for internal lighting. Obviously no one has considered the danger from indoor sunburn from these lamps and a rooftop nuke would be a much more reliable solution that a glorified and much more complicated, sun mirror.
What happens when it's cloudy? Such a stupid idea to use the sun for light during the day as it is *obviously* not as reliable as a rooftop nuke.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Incorrect. Most geodesic domes survive direct interaction with tornadoes. There is a cement dome home in the tornado belt that survived a F-5 tornado. with having all the exterior paint stripped off, but the building was left intact and undamaged.
Just becaouse most people are stupid and build their homes like flimsy boxes does not mean ALL are.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I remember reading about this technology in the late 1970s or early 1980s in Weekly Reader, a print publication for the lowest elementary school grades in the U.S., designed to get kids interested in reading about a broad range of topics. One issue featured a Japanese office building that had a solar collector (a parabolic dish) on the roof, and then fiber optic cables that were run to various offices. Because the fiber carried so much of the sun's intensity, they had to terminate the fiber runs behind a diffuser (similar to what photographers used). I've been itching to see the technology reach the consumer market for years and years--I'd love to have natural light cycles visible in our basement rooms, and at the office I'd love to minimize our use of light fixtures when we could use natural light.
If you have kids in school who still get Weekly Reader, take some time to read it with them. I've been amazed how, time and again, their predictions and insights into new technologies have been right on the mark.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I recently had a "Sun Tube" (sold at Home Depot and Lowes) installed in my house as an experiment.
They cost about $153. It eliminates the need for a couple 60 watt bulbs and provides the lighting of about 300 watts.
There appears to be no heat gain but I'm sure there is some.
I'm happy with the results-- some people are not. The light is not yellowy like the light we are used to - it's blue white. You look outside the window and it's the same color but somehow it seems different when there isn't a window to compare.
At current prices, I am not sure these would pay off.
It has a "dimmer" door which is run by a solar powered battery as an option for more money.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
It is possible to design a collector to take advantage of chromatic aberration to limit the amount of light outside the visible range that gets in, therefore limiting the amount of heat.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Update for anyone interested. Put one out this morning over the doorway leading to the front porch, just hung it from a string, and it is spinning and swaying around in the breeze. Seems to scare the flies away. We were getting them hanging out and around the screen door, where they would book in whenever it got opened. Now not seeing any. It isn't effecting the big bumblebees at all.