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.

Comments

There are no details

[BobPaul]

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.

Re:There are no details

[BobPaul]

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.

Re:There are no details

[Lumpy]

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.....

what a great idea!

[cnkurzke]

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??

Re:what a great idea!

[Vinegar Joe]

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.

Re:what a great idea!

[dgatwood]

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.

Re:what a great idea!

[feepness]

Yes, but I've been banned from training monkeys to move the mirrors and the slaves keep going blind. Never trust a blind slave to shave you...

The sighted monkeys aren't such a great idea either.

50W lightbulb using a common 2L Bottle

[Hadlock]

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

Re:50W lightbulb using a common 2L Bottle

[value_added]

Maybe you're the person to ask ...

Some years back I stopped for a meal at a restaurant in the historical district of a small town here in California. The restaurant was a converted barn of some sort and had two large double doors for an entrance. During business hours, those doors were left open, as were another set of interior doors that led to an open air patio outside. Hanging on the wall by each sets of doors was a large 1-quart ziplock bag. The bag was filled with water.

Noticing the bags, I asked the owner about them. She told me they were there to keep the flies from coming into the restaurant. I asked how a water-filled bag worked to keep flies away, and she said, "No idea, but do you see any flies in here?" Indeed, there were no flies to be seen (though there were some outside). She went on to tell me that that they had a regular fly problem years back, and one day a local immigrant gardner suggested the bags. The rest, as they say, is history.

I'd guess an entomologist might be the one to ask, but have you heard of this technique being used?

Re:50W lightbulb using a common 2L Bottle

[masterQba]

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1956/whats-the-purpose-of-bags-of-water-hanging-in-restaurants/ The water bag acts as a lens that enhances movement. The flies react to the movement - they stay away.

Bradbury story

[wisebabo]

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.

From their website ...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

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 ...

Re:From their website ...

[thsths]

> 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.

Re:Bradbury story -- it was Bob Shaw

[andrewbaldwin]

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.

Re:Why haven't these been around?

[eclectro]

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.

This one goes around corners

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What distinguishes this from, say, Solatube?

[GlenRaphael]

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.

Sunpipes are old news

[petes_PoV]

Though this one, looks far too complicated, with it's solar tracker 'n' all. Too much to go wrong for what has generally been considered a simple solution due to it's low-tech approach at getting light into a space.

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.

Hey!

[icebraining]

our favorite star, the Sun?

My favorite star is Proxima Centauri, you insensitive clod.

nukdolier

[MrKaos]

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.