Published on 12, July, 2020
As some of you have may seen from my posts, I am an advocate of health and safety when it comes to sensory issues. With restrictions and bans on more natural sources of light in the UK and EU, it is becoming increasingly difficult to not feel assaulted by harsh and blinding LEDs. However, I discovered an organisation who can help us in our own homes.
LIGHT AWARE is able to provide an Exemption card to these new laws: https://lightaware.org/about/lightaware-card/
With this card, it appears as though we will be able to buy incandescent bulbs in a pharmacy. Halogens appear as though they'll still be available online.
Parents with young Autistic Children, I would personally recommend to put incandescent or halogen in your children's room. Although, a possible good use for a safety LED for them would be in a Salt Lamp nightlight which properly breaks up / diffuses the light so it's much less harsh.
I experience headaches, blurred vision, an inability to see items properly, blindness with oncoming traffic or bikes at night or the lights over a footpath. Halogen and Incandescent light is incredibly similar to natural light under a spectrometer. I believe there are several scientific reasons it is more human friendly. Light Aware has an amazing amount of articles on the matter.
Cool. What you are doing is really interesting. I was sensitive to light at a younger age, but now at the age of sixty, I like LOTS of it.
I've had a spell of doing photography, hydroponics, and latterly spectrum analysis of gases so I've taken quite an interest in light and LED's particualrly ever since they first apppeared, in my quest for more lumens per watt. (I'm an off grid hobbyist, so efficeny is important to me)
They have the capabilty of mixing up whatever light spectrum you require these days, but I believe in order to get the luminous power to try and equal the gold standard of a 100w tungsten lamp from a few watts of LED, they use pulses of high frequency A.C. overlaid over a D.C. current. (for the techs out there a "dirty" switch mode PSU.)
Optically, therefore, there are all sorts of spurious and non-natiural frequencies effectively "amplitude modulated" onto the light, and if it's these frequencies that cause your discomfort, no amount of selecting warm or daylight varieties wiill work. And teh technical solution of filtering the PSU will just cause the LEDS to fail earlier..
Which is a pity. I scored about 30 LED striplights from government surplus a couple of years back, and they give a lovely, flat, even illumination, however.
But they are fifty quid a pop, rather than the normal few quid a cheap LED fitting and lamp can cost.
Teh production adn mangement of light, is a most fascinatiing phenomenon, and if they can get LEDS right, they will save us a packet in energy terms...
You’re probably right.
Now there’s laws to make halogens energy efficient which hopefully I can stick to. I blame planned obsolescence.
Just looking at spectrum readings it’s obvious why LEDs are a nightmare. We need more research into human optics. How we borrow IR and some UV information to better perceive the visual spectrum. Individuals who are colourblind are great for this sort of study but I can’t imagine LEDs are anything but unreasonable for them typically missing the green cone.