Lumenator 2.0
Late in 2019, I, like many of my rationalist friends purchased the parts for and assembled a genuine, bona fide LUMENATOR™️ - a device for greatly increasing the brightness of your home - according to the original specification. To me, lumenators are the quintessential application of the More Dakka mindset: when you face a problem that responds positively to a little bit of X and responds even more positively to larger amounts of X, you don’t just stop applying X once you feel you’ve done a reasonable amount of it, you add more and more and more until your problem goes away or X stops working. I built a lumenator not for seasonal affective disorder, but because it helps me wake up feeling refreshed in the morning and I feel happy when my house is very bright inside. In 2019 I lived in a small group house in Waterloo, ON and we’d often give people directions to our house like “turn the corner and then look for the one with ridiculously bright light streaming from the windows”. They’d show up without trouble and remark: “Wow, I didn’t actually expect I’d be able to find your place based on those directions”.
I’ve brought my lumenator with me through 5 changes of address and still used it up until a few months ago. More recently I’ve felt that despite trying really hard, as a community we didn’t More Dakka hard enough. When you really push the envelope on luminance there are a few limiting factors you run into: cost, power, and heat dissipation. Luckily for us, there’s an industry that has massively ballooned in the days since Eliezer’s original post and has created an industrial-scale demand signal for light sources that are super bright, about as compact as possible without being a fire hazard or requiring active cooling, and emit light that is spectrally similar to sunlight. Want to take a guess? marijuana
The idea: mount one of these lights directly above my bed, put something in between to diffuse the light coming from the many tiny LEDs, and put it on a timer so it gradually brightens around the time I want to wake up. Here’s my build:
- $210: passively cooled 200 Watt lamp: SPIDER FARMER SF2000Pro, Full Spectrum Plant Grow Light, Dimmable
- $70: Spider Farmer GGS Controller Kits (for timer based schedule)
- I’m sure you could DIY a replacement for this, but I don’t have time for that :)
- $13: Photography Diffuser Fabric 78.7 x 59 Inches
- Empirically, the fabric is almost imperceptibly warmed when mounted ~1.5 ft. from the light for several hours of continuous use, so I think there’s minimal risk of starting a fire.
- I also tried Diffusion Gels Filter Sheet Kit 15.7x19.6inches but these were too small. I found gel filter sheets to be significantly better at diffusing without attenuating though, so I’d shop for a larger version of this next time around.
- ~$35: ceiling hooks to mount the light, and to mount the diffusion fabric, a grommeting kit, some fishing line, and a few command hooks.
- I’d recommend you anchor your hooks in something stronger than drywall so you don’t need to find out what it’s like to be woken up by an 8 pound piece of metal falling on your face (I too am blissfully unaware of this).
Total: ~$330
At 200W the lamp offers a PPF of 540 µmol/s, but we’re not plants and our eyes perceive some wavelengths as more or less bright. Accounting for luminous efficiency and the lamp’s spectrum the manufacturer estimates we get about 53 lumens per µmol/s, or a total luminous power of about 30,000 lumens. With similar calculations Claude estimates the illuminance as about 4,000 lux @ 6 ft. or 33,000 lux @ 2 ft. Not bad at all!
Here’s what it looks like without the diffusion filter:
And with:
Anecdotally it feels really bright, the pictures don’t do it justice. I’ve configured it to turn on in the morning at minimum brightness and then increase to maximum over ten minutes. At maximum it doesn’t feel quite like sunlight but doesn’t feel like normal indoor lighting either; it feels more like basking in indirect sunlight in a cozy glade on a crisp summer day. My bedroom has pot lights installed that guests regularly complain about for being too bright, and if the lumenator is on you can barely tell the difference when I turn them on.
There’s only one problem: the device can be set to brightness levels between 11% and 100% but not below 11%, and it turns out that 11% is still really bright! Bright enough to wake me up instantly when it clicks on. I’ll be looking around for a similar light with a more dynamic range on the lower end.
Overall, it’s been a very fun experiment and I’ll likely continue using it despite the 11% problem because it feels really nice. If you’re interested in trying it out for yourself I’d be happy to post more detailed instructions. Let me know.