Since it's that time of year again for my fellow northerners with SAD, film lights can be wonderfully bright, and the heat is a welcome side benefit!

Screw Verilux with their overpriced "10,000 lux" 10W panel (only at less than 6 inches from your face), instead get a high-CRI studio light over my reading chair and I'll be happy all winter.

Sounds more like a "you'll be warm for the rest of your life" situation. :-P

Just copy whatever train operators use as a deadman's switch, so the light turns off if you don't squeeze a handle very minute or something lol

Film lights are fantastic for emulating daylight.

I got two of these, $350, but they’re fantastic and I use them in place of my crappy ceiling lights:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1753990-REG/amaran_ap...

Or you can just buy 490nm LED bulbs, which is the wavelength the photoreceptors in the eye related to circadian rhythms are most sensitive to. Just be aware that they should be off to the sides and ideally indirect, because concentrated blue light is actually hazardous to the eye.

One can also buy a couple of bright, high-CRI LED bulbs for one's existing lights and save themselves about $650, because the difference between those and the studio lights is typically red spectrum coverage, which is not relevant for circadian rhythm / SAD treatment. The film/TV LED lights are also designed to have a really smooth spectrum, minimizing gaps. If you want to do that...fine, but please don't advise people to waste lots of money on something completely unnecessary.

I assure you, a double-height high-CRI LED strip running along the edges of the room will throw a fuckton of light without the issues caused by having two very intense point sources, namely shadows and glare.

There's almost never a problem with too much blue light in the high CRI bulbs (in fact, the people doing the spectrograms are usually looking for bulbs without the high blue spectrum spikes, and many people are looking for bulbs without the blue spikes (and they're hard to find!)

Yeah – to be clear, I am not doing it for any particular element of physical health or circadian rhythm, I am just trying to emulate sunlight for aesthetic reasons (yum, red spectrum coverage)

Smart bulbs sacrifice on light quality for color and dumb bulbs can't adjust color temperature (even dumbly!). Studio lighting is expensive but has both.

I love the idea of a high-CRI LED strip, because, yeah, an intense point source is really not ideal to light a room. But the strip would need to be bi-color, but such a thing probably exists. I just moved and I have zero ceiling sockets, so A19 is dead to me :(

I have two of the crappy 10,000 lux ones that I potato chip chip to stay on top of my monitors in my home office.

> that I potato chip chip to stay on top of my monitors

What does that mean?

Presumably they mean a potato chip clip. The kind of V shaped clip that one uses to close a bag of potato chips. A fancy clothespin.

A Bulldog Clip[1]?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldog_clip

Ya, that style. The ones from the dollar store for potato chip bags have that nice wide mouth, so it can grab the monitor and then the light rests on the monitor but is kept from falling by the clip.

You can clip one vertical on the vertical edge and one on the horizontal edge of the monitor. Just don't party on your desk or move it too much.

I'm intrigued, any recommendations?

I am currently using a Fovitec Bicolor 650 LED panel - it was cheap and I am cheap. I replaced the power supply with a higher-wattage unit because it flickered at max power, that might be enough to make me not recommend it but it works for me.

I previously used some adhesive LED strip lights on a 24x24 plate of aluminum. If DIY electronics are your aesthetic, go for it!

See also these posts:

https://meaningness.com/sad-light-led-lux

https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens

for a much more detailed writeup (no affiliation).

I personally use a 28600lm, 2ft, 220W linear bay light from superbrightleds.com for $130. The CRI is only 80+, but I personally don't think I can tell the difference. Like the other poster, I am cheap, but like actually cheap in that I made a spreadsheet to get the greatest lumens/$.

I wouldn't suggest going brighter though, 30klm is already bright enough I can't look at the light directly and need to bounce it off the walls for comfort. The cat doesn't seem to mind though: https://i.imgur.com/aTegmqR.mp4

I use a 600W Godox M600BI, it's great.

I found that 200-300W is about the optimum from a dollars per high quality lumen perspective. The SmallRig COB lights are great if you can get them at a discount.

Dont forget the small power plant you will now neef!

> The one time we had an inadvertent discharge of a fire sprinkler in the historic building we're in

Ouch, hopefully the film production company had liability insurance! It’s easy to rack up six figures of damage by setting off fire sprinkler.

It's usually not like in the movies that when one sprinkler goes off, the entire building is getting a shower. That's only for high risk installations.

Usually it's just one in the fire area, they trigger with a heat sensitive capsule that breaks.

Do apartment buildings count as high risk? Genuine question

Anyway if I remember my highrise fire safety training right there is at least one building where on sprinkler going off sets the others off. IIRC the pressure drop from one unit activating triggered a pump and the subsequent increase in pressure popped the other.

Perhaps you’re thinking of how the jockey pump and main pump work together in a sprinkler system.

A jockey pump maintains pressure in the system and is sized at less than the flow rate of one sprinkler head. The main fire pump is activated when a pressure transmitter detects a drop in pressure. The jockey pump can’t maintain pressure when a sprinkler head opens, and the drop in pressure starts the main fire pump.

No they don't. Only industrial places like storage of flammables or high-dust that can cause explosions.

Of course it would be quite annoying to have your apartment flooded because one of the neighbours let their pizza burn :P

Cool, thank you for clarifying!

A burning pizza just kicks off the fire alarm, not the sprinklers. Frankly I don't remember much past the the whole drop in pressure detection leading to kickoff of other sprinklers thing to suggest what level of partitioning occurred .

How close/far we talking? Could you have touched the sprinkler and the light at the same time (if you ignore height difference related difficulties)?

Sprinkler vials are designed to break at temperatures as low as 135 degrees. Air temperature plus radiated heat could easily hit that even if the light is fairly far below the head.

There is no doubt in my mind that the light we used could have set off the sprinklers from at least fifty feet.

I don't know off the top of my head the amp rating, but I know we had to have the room electric supply upgraded (and this was already a well equipped robotics lab - it isn't like the electric supply was bad to begin with).

The light itself was about three feet in diameter, four feet long, and, like, 200 pounds. It was a big old hunk of photon-generating madness.

Yeah, I have a physical sense for how hot lights are, but I don't have a physical sense for what 'surprising proximity to a sprinkler' is and I'm trying to borrow theirs to sate my curiosity.