Anybody use full spectrum lights? How do you like them? Do they seem to deliver on half the hype? The Ott Lite is one of the more famous brands, and now there are any number of knock offs. There are also full spectrum bulbs that can be purchased separately from the lamps. One extra benefit is that most full spectrum lights seem to be fluorescents of some flavor, meaning they use much less electricity than traditional bulbs. Hopefully with better lighting to boot.
I am also looking at a Verilux mini-book light for emergency lighting, possible camping, and extra light for reading. Anyone have a small light that they really like.
Yes, I do have a book light that I really, really like! It’s best feature is that you can read and not disturb others, because the light doesn’t spread out.
You can use it to light your way around a dark house, too, in case the power goes off. It doesn’t direct a beam of light, but it glows sufficiently.
It’s a LightWedge. They come in different sizes, serve as a bookmark, get 40 hours off of one set of batteries, and have nice cases, too.
Just lay the acrylic screen on the page, and it’s the only thing illuminated:
I seem to be very sensitive to lighting quality. Regular incandescent and fluorescents give me a headache after a while. I liken them to sounds played painfully loud. (Picture me sitting in night school classrooms with a constantly furled brow.)
I have an Ott Lite that I put on the kitchen table when I do serious reading/studying and another at my drawing table. They’re ok. I bought them originally to do needlework, sewing and watercolor painting by.
Generally around the house, I much prefer what passes as full spectrum incandescent bulbs to sunshine fluorescent bulbs.
My husband tells me halogen bulbs match sunlight but they scare me with all that heat they generate so I use the ones we have very sparingly with the exception in my shiatsu studio where I like the quality of light they provide at the lower levels of lighting I use during sessions.
Full-spectrum lights do not remain full-spectrum (as the frequencies degrade over time at different rates). We use incandescent - I just don’t like fluorescents and the energy noise from the ballasts (tune a portable AM radio in between stations and approach the fixture).
The big push by government here is to get everyone off of incandescents and onto compact mini fluorescents. They burn quite brightly for the first few weeks, and then take progressively longer to attain full brightness.
I much prefer the colour of these mini fluorescents compared to the yellowness of incandescents, but as has been mentioned above, any fluorescent light will lose its colour balance, usually by six months. That doesn’t mean that the light doesn’t still work, only that it doesn’t have its initial colour balance. This is normal for fluorescents, as some of the less stable phosphors used for some parts of the spectrum get used up faster than others.
One easy way to tell the type of colour spectrum a particular bulb will give you is the Colour Rendition Index (CRI). This is a percentage measure of how close colours will appear under that lightbulb compared to natural sunlight. The closer the CRI is to 100 the more natural things will appear.
I use full-spectrum lighting for the birds, primarily. They need it to make Vit D. For knitting I like the Ott light too. My husband is a lighting fanatic, and nearly every bulb in the house is a fluorescent, but I prefer the incandescent bulb light that I grew up with.
I’m planning to try one of these in a single lamp before I buy a batch for larger areas because I’m dubious of anything fluorescent. Commercial lighting, for ex, seems to give off a greenish-bluish cast that doesn’t flatter the complexion of anyone I know of. OTOH, I like the warm tones of incandescents. Do you find these little compact fluorescents to be as unforgiving as the big buzzy things in classrooms, etc?
I understand what you mean about the greenish light of the long tubular fluorescents, but those are bottom of the market (cheapo) tubes you are referring to. There are any number of spectrums now available in fluorescent lights, and too many shapes to name them all.
I haven’t been on the mini compacts for long enough to tell, but so far they have been very white with no noticable colour drift. The government program just started this summer. Time will tell. Besides using less electricity, these bulbs are supposed to last five or six years, but if the colours go all wonky before then it might not be such a great deal.
I replaced the majority of the lights in our apartment with compact florescent lights. Simply replacing them as the old ones burned out. Because of their size, not all of the light fixtures will accept them. (the glass globe covers are especially bad) I also found out this way that many of the light bulbs that were in the apartment before me were in sockets rated for much less electricity. The lights in the bathroom have a strange socket that you cannot change them.
We were lucky once and one of the hardware stores had a display of their lights so you could turn one on and see what it looked like, but the modern ones seem to be a lot better than the first generation of compact florescent lights.
I like the bulbs most for their long life, so that I do not have to get onto a latter to change the things.
I have been using the small 60 watt curved-tubular fluorescent bulbs for several years, and I like the qulaity of the light that they give off. They last much longer than your normal incandescent bulbs, and they use far less current for the same amount of light. That amounts to a substantial savings in energy cost over a period of a year. Another thing that I like about the fluorescent bulbs is that they naturally don’t generate as much heat as the incandescent bulbs of a similar brightness. This means that your lamp fixture switches last longer. With the incandescent bulbs I had to replace the switches because they got fried with the heat. Now I can use a 100 watt equivalent fluorescent bulb (if it will fit) in a fixture that was originally designed for nothing greater than a 60 watt incandescent bulb because of heat limitations.
With regard to the small, full-spectrum fluorescent lamps that are now available in home-improvement stores, I find that I prefer not to use them for any length of time. I seem to be bothered by the quality of the light that they give off, and I prefer to read or to do craft projects with the standard curved tubular fluorescent bulbs. However, I have been using the full-strectrum lamps in conjunction with the other bulbs when I want to do very close work for a short period of time.
Recently, with the coming of winter, I moved some of my yard plants into the basement, so I needed to get special fluorescent tubes that are designed for plants and aquariums. I thought that I would like the quality of this type of lighting, but I was wrong. The light looks too red to me. So the plants have their little area, and I have an area with ten, 4 foot cool-white fluorescent tubes, so that I have enough light to really see what I am doing at my flutemaking bench.
Too right. Our eyes are adapted to the the yellow-green portion of the spectrum. Terrestrial plants want the red end. Corals want actinic blue. There are a huge number of fluorescents designed to meet these many different market segments.
Presumably you’ll have a shade over any compact fluorescents, so the green won’t be an issue. We have them in all the lamps in which they will fit. My only complaint is that they just don’t throw as much light as an incandescent. For some reason, I think they’re saying that 31W of compact fluorescent is the equivalent of 150W of incandescent – it just ain’t truee. Again, this could be due to lamp shades. It’s possible that the color of most shades doesn’t pass as much of the spectrum of a fluorescent as it does of an incandescent.
This is the booklight that we use. It uses a single LED light and runs on two or four AA batteries. The light is the same quality either way, but it lasts twice as long (and is a bit heavier) when four batteries are used.
Got one in the living room lamp (with lampshade). As a fellow fan of the warm color of incandescents, color-wise it seemed very acceptable from the start, actually, and still does, although I noted djm’s comment that they take progressively longer to get up to speed: sometimes it seems a bit…um…dim and yellowish, for lack of a better way of putting it. Later on it’s fine and I wonder what I was seeing and if it wasn’t just me. Haven’t had the bulb all that long, so the jury’s out yet. Too may variables (lampshade color, time of turning on the lamp, other lighting, etc.).
Definitely like the idea of it being an energy-saver and long-lived.
I also use CFL’s wherever I can - I have a couple fixtures that won’t accept them. I’ve been very happy with them, with the noted taking time to “warm up” problem.
I just bought a lamp with a full spectrum bulb a couple of weeks ago. So far I really like it, though I’ve used it more for ambient lighting than for task-related lighting.
Got an Ott light on right now, and, as far as Seasonal Affective Whatever goes, I feel just spiffy.
For reading in bed, I just use a Petzl Tikka headlamp. The new LED’s are a lot better light (less blue, nukes your night-vision less) and cost a bunch more than the cheapos ($40). They have a low-power mode for reading, and a high power mode for evidence-searches, tracking, swearing at frozen pipes under the house, or whatever. Weighs about an ounce, comes with a red filter for tactical use, but not immersion-proof.
Then, when the power’s out, wind’s howlin’, and I’ve got to clear a tree off the driveay at night, nothing beats a ParCan (car headlight) hooked up to a motorcycle battery. Can’t get much more redneck than that.
I keep a supply of ten 12v gell-cells just for such occasions
I’m to the point where I can run my smaller ham rig and still have energy for the computer, phone chargers, etc.
