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Illuminating Window-Less Houses With a Plastic Bottle
New submitter DancesWithWolves writes "The BBC reports on Alfredo Moser, who came up with a way of illuminating his house during the day without electricity — using nothing more than plastic bottles filled with water and a tiny bit of bleach. In the last two years his idea has spread throughout the world. It is expected to be in one million homes by early next year.'"
I've seen this type of lighting system before on old ships (USS Constitution, etc...).
Instead of a water they used glass blocks (or similar).
But, it's great to see a novel way of recycling trash into something beneficial! :)
Cheers!
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
Great idea and implementation... at least where you have the type of roof where it can be used. One modification I would add would be to add something to the water in order to make it just a bit cloudy... this would diffuse the light a bit more. Of course, depending on the plastic, it may cloud up as it ages in any case, or start with cloudy plastic (i.e. plastic milk bottles).
Elegant and no energy costs. It recycles something we all have handy. Easy to install also. Hard to argue with all those benefits!
They're completely unhackable!.
Soon they'll be mandatory in Enterprise deployments.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
It's a rudimentary light pipe really. Clever but not much use unless you're directly underneath a flimsy roof. That said, I'd like to see more real light tube installations in multistory buildings. Sunlight beats both LED and fluorescent in energy efficiency and light quality.
"I just heard someone on the roof. Why is it yellow in here?"
Moser actually came up with the idea back in 2002 in Brazil. The "last two years" mentioned in the summary is a reference to efforts to spread the idea around the world, of which the site you mentioned is one such example. That site started about two years ago, and if you check the About page, you'll see that they credit him as the originator of the idea and mention that they are working to spread the idea in the Philippines.
If it's already sunny and you need light but have no electricity.. Get windows or go outside.
People using this have no money for glass, probably nothing for any other kind of windows, either. This will give a lot more than no light when it rains, too. People living in slums do not necessarily have the communal space you assume they have - if they can do things at home, chances are that's the place to do it.
Even if those things were to leak after three years, always, it would still be worth it for three years of work.
And what's with the night part? Do you think starlight will keep people from sleeping?
NEVER leaks, he claims, having done it for the first time 2 years ago.
Only 9 years out.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
to illuminating a house with no windows is . . . to add windows? Wow.
I mean, some kudos are deserved for finding an inexpensive (almost free) way to add windows, and using windows whose shape provides some refractory scattering of the incoming light. Still though, his solution to no windows was literally TO ADD WINDOWS.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
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This is Slashdot, where perfect is the enemy of good.
Because there are edge use-cases where this won't work, it's completely unsuitable for ALL applications.
Or, to put it another way, because it won't work in some guy's shed in Anchorage, poor people in Africa, Asia and South America should continue to toil in the dark until a proper solution involving LEDs and / or light pipes is made available.
Now, instead let's discuss how 2014 will definitely be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Please read this comment regarding aliteroflight.org - or at least check their "About" page first.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Plastic bottles aren't exactly UV-stable...
Actually it's probably as old as clear glass bottles, there are mining shacks that used empty whiskey bottles for windows since they didn't have window glass (likely because they drank all the profits before winter came).
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
So, who do you think this particular article is talking about?
Honestly it seems that every year for the past 4 years slashdot herolds this.
Then HAD will do it in about 2 days.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yeah, but given the sheer number of people around the world who do live directly underneath a flimsy roof ... this is the kind of thing which can be an improvement to probably millions of people for the cost of some plastic bottles and bleach.
Am I going to poke holes in the shingled and insulated roof of my townhouse to put in plastic bottles? Nope. Are there a huge amount of people in the world for which this would provide cheap lighting? Absolutely.
Indeed, who of us hasn't sat in a part of an office which doesn't afford any natural light at all?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
And this will be coming to the USA also, because they will have to jack up utility rates, just to
please the enviro-nuts in the USA.
I hate to break this to ya, Chief, but the jacking of utility rates has far less to do with "enviro-nuts" than it does greedy utility company executives.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Are you saying that because we've seen this for the last two years that this is somehow not news?
The carbon black typically used to color plastic black is also a pretty good UV protectant. Could be the caps break down in the sun before the PET.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's what I hate about shanty towns. No food or running water but every shack has a hardwood floor and is filled with antique furniture. This morning there was a guy outside my office begging for a few coins so I told him: "I will buy you some drugs but I won't give you money. You'll only spend it on a Louis XV side table." You have to be tough with these people or they'll never learn.
son? I knew we'd meet here eventually..
Only I can judge you.
The BBC article goes all breathless about this great low-tech approach for poor third-world countries without mentioning the fact that the user has drilled a bunch of holes in their roof. Combine that with a rainy climate like the Philippines (mentioned in the article) and you've got a problem. The solution, apparently, is polyester resin. Excellent choice, and so widely available in third-world slums. No slam intended to the unfortunate residents who are also blessed with power tools.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Moser didn't come up with shit. He just built a modern iteration of technology that has been around for thousands of years.
He came up with a modern iteration that can be widely and immediately deployed in the poorest parts of the world using freely available ubiquitous components and readily available installation skillsets?
I'm curious where you've set the bar before you give someone credit for coming up with something.
Ah yes. The "let them eat cake" solution.
Have gnu, will travel.
Tools only require power in lazy post-industrial societies. Hand tools are inexpensive, effective and less costly to operate. I've cut steel roofing with hand snips in seconds.
Polyester resin is kind of a staple product. In post-industrial societies, it's sold for recreation in craft stores. But in less developed places, it's needed for boat building and all sorts of fabrication. Before 3D printers with their costly supplies, we made molds and used resin for pennies.
I imagine they are chosing it over tar or pitch due to availability as much as any other factor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zMAWztZ6TI This guy in Brazil thought it up in 2002 during a blackout, I'm pretty sure that's more than 2 years ago. This story keeps getting recycled as writers and editors forget that they've already covered it before.
Ah, must have never been in a slum, then. For some reason or another, the few slums I've been in are often arranged around straight or almost straight paths, paralleled together, with the shacks sharing one or more walls, or at least being built very close to each other. The population densities there probably beat a lot of western mid-rise residential neighborhoods (8-12 stories). Three of the walls are thus usually out of commission, any windows there wouldn't let much light in, unless the neighbor's shack was ablaze :/ The front wall faces an often narrow "street". There'll be "stuff" hanging in said street, say tarps to keep the scorching sunlight out, or laundry, produce and occasional meat drying, etc. Thus, not much light is reaching the front wall either. Really the roof is the only option, and some discarded metal and bottles are about as affordable as they get. The caulking is a bit more of an expense, but presumably one could scavenge something from trash leaving the construction sites. Remember that opened caulking containers have a finite shelf life, and slum kids are professional scavengers, for lack of a better term.
The way those lights are meant to be installed is. 1. A bottle is caulked into a piece of metal that is shaped to match the grooves/waves in the roof. The metal has a circular hole cut out with a diameter a couple cm smaller than the diameter of the bottle. Radial slots are cut along the circumference of the hole. The resulting tabs are then bent up at right angle. Those tabs are then caulked to the bottle, and caulked over. 2. A roughly bottle-diameter hole is cut into the roof, and the assembly from #1 is caulked onto the roof. The assembly #1 is the replaceable assembly, and it can be "reverted" to a bottle-less version by using a variant without, you know, the bottle installed in it.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.