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.
It's thin on the details because there are no details. This is just a flexible aluminum tube and a diffuser. The only thing different about this than the kits you can get at Menards is the big collector array which tracks the sun.
There's no solar panels in this system. On cloudy days, you use electric lighting.
Our Sundolier delivers sunlight so effectively that electric lighting can be turned off when the sun is out offering excellent opportunities to save electricity while reducing heat generation through cool indirect daylighting.
There's no mention anywhere, not in the inhabitat.com article, nor the companies website, that this does anything on cloudy days.
this works amazing, we should find a new name for this revolutionary device, how about we call it a WINDOW????
only downside, it doesnt work when it's needed most, namely AT NIGHT, when it's dark.
Maybe WINDOWS version 2.1 will fix that??
This has been done in the 3rd world for ages. You drill a hole in your roof, mount a 2L soda bottle filled with water (and two cap-fulls of bleach to keep it clean and clear), and stick an old black plastic film canister overtop of the white lid to keep the plastic from degrading. The video of these in use is amazing. Sadly however it only works when the sun is up - which is most of the workday (12 hrs typically) in the tropics.
Watch it in action. Wow. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zMAWztZ6TI
moox. for a new generation.
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.
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?
The collector has servo motors so it can track the sun and maximize the amount of light sent to the diffuser. Otherwise it's just the same standard aluminum tubes you'd find in any solar collector installation.
I noticed that they are mixing color temperatures in that video.
Sunlight is CTB-- "color-temperature blue" -- about 6500 Kelvin.
Tungsten lights are CTO - "color-temperature orange" -- about 3200 Kelvin
When you have a big skylight but use tungsten lamps to light the same room, the effect is this weird blue/orange clashing effect where areas lit by the different light sources appear to have different hues. The same thing is common in grade schools or offices where blue light from the windows collides with the greenish or yellowish flickering light of fluorescents. Photographers may be especially familiar with the idea of color correction to keep the colors appearing uniform. If you mix bulbs in the tungsten spectrum with these bottles or the horizontal lighting cutout panels we call "windows", you may want to get specially color-balanced lightbulbs with the blue color so they don't clash.
I think you mean "Other Days, Other Eyes" by Bob Shaw
Thanks for reminding me -- I read it many years ago and enjoyed it - may re-read it now :-)
It also appeals to another Slashdot meme - an evil government using crop-dusters to sow millions of shards of 'slow glass' to act as passive surveillance.
I've wondered for years why nobody made something like this... (Or have they, and I just didn't know about it?)
You just haven't known about it. This is a variation upon a theme of the solar tube. You can even get them in Costco now for under $200 USD each. Though this company appears to be trying to patent this very specific design, a parabolic collector feeding sunlight indoors is not new, and much of the technology is in the public domain and used with varying degrees of success. Naturally, you'll have a higher performing system the more money you put into it, but a good ROI is difficult to achieve as with any solar product. Of course, there also is something to be said for getting off the grid (and more reliability outside of cloudy days) in itself, which may be difficult to put a price on.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Something like this one: http://www.sunlight-direct.com/ uses fiber optic cables to catch the sunlight and then send it around corners/to other floors/etc. It also doesn't work at night . . . yet. But throw in a few undersea cables (interlight backbone) and we could have a daylight exchange program with nations on the other side of the planet.
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!
A tornado can wreck any roof.
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
The difference - and this is important - is that they used the word 'robot' and pretended it was something exciting, rather than an incremental improvement on the standard light-pipe design.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
My favorite star is Proxima Centauri, you insensitive clod.
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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...
does it run Linux?
Sorry, someone had to ask.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Per their company president: $15K + install
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
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.