[theatraine]

Tangentially related: I've been experimenting with very bright lights from when I wake up to sunset. In my bedroom/home office I have a couple 6000k LED lights at 8100 lumens making the room almost as bright as noon outdoors. Post-sunset I use dim red lights. I was inspired by SAD lights but didn't like any of the ones I tried so went with high-powered "corn" LED lights in normal fixtures.

I've noticed that I tend to get sleepier at night which is great as before I would have to force myself to go to sleep (I'm a natural night person.)

I've also noticed a small increase in my distance visual acuity (subjectively measured by me using an eye chart so not the most accurate.) I have read that intense outdoor light protects against myopia (see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470669/) so I suspect this is related.

[jiggawatts]

I wonder why there's only engineering and so little science in the design of modern dwellings! A lot of our constraints, such as maximum illumination lux have gone away thanks to new technology, but the "wellness science" hasn't been applied. It's not even an established scientific discipline, which is why I'm struggling to come up with a name for it.

I haven't heard of any large construction company or architect firm focusing on human-centric attributes such as:

* Minimising the levels of O3, CO2 and CO

* Fine particulate filtering

* Daylight-equivalent illumination

* Red-shifting illumation to simulate dusk

* Noise insulation such as double-glazed glass or weighted foam partitioning walls

* Etc...

In principle, living and working indoors could be much better for us, but nobody seems to be spending real effort in achieving this.

Instead, everyone is dead set on optimising for square-footage or workers-per-floor, completely disregarding basic humans needs.

For example, the office of a large government agency where I'm contracting has atrocious air-conditioning in their main city office building. The temperatures are over 26C (79F) most of the time, and I get blinding headaches from the CO2 buildup after a day of bad ventilation. After about 2pm I'm basically a zombie and can't concentrate. Noone has bothered to do anything about this for literally years.

(This is not my imagination: Their own staff work in air quality monitoring, so for laughs they used one of their probes in the middle of our floor and it basically read "off scale high" on nearly every metric.)

Meanwhile, another building around the corner has floor-to-ceiling glass windows letting in a lot of light and nice cool refreshing air-conditioning. There, I can work until 6:30pm regularly without feeling run down.

[teadrivendev]

Much of this is covered by The International WELL Building Institute guidelines, latest version is at https://www.wellcertified.com/certification/v2/ but it is only slowly coming in as best practice and is a long way from being compulsory. It doesn't completely cover all the aspects you listed, in particular - relevant to this thread - it doesn't actually require red-shifting to simulate dusk - see FAQ #82 on https://v2.wellcertified.com/v/en/light/feature/3

So although you might consider it inadequate, there are certainly people looking into this and there is lots of science behind it.

[foobarian]

I love the LED lights available today. I am able to pack 10x more light per watt into my office using hacked together fixtures to the point it is eye piercingly bright. It really helps in the low light of winter. Before this point, the other efficient option were HID lights but the spectrums on those are all wrong for reasonable residential lighting.

[theatraine]

I absolutely agree. As an aside I also have a CO2 monitor (Awair device) and make sure to keep my bedroom/home office below 700ppm. This is easily achieved by keeping the window open. Self experimentation has shown that I tend to yawn quite a bit more at levels greater than 1000ppm.

[sharedfrog]

Did you see this link, posted here a month ago? Opens a whole new world where 30,000 lumens per room is a reasonable option. https://www.benkuhn.net/lux

[theatraine]

I didn't see this, thanks for posting it! My thought process was really similar to the author's actually and I've been happy with the results so far. I've distributed the lights around my room with shades to mitigate the unpleasantness factor as opposed to going with the "megabulb".

[scotty79]

I made a lamp that does 25k lumens (and about 20k lux at 1 meter) but when I use it to light my room from the ceiling the light is bright enough to be unpleasent. Like going out during sunny day.

I'll experiment with spreading lights a bit more.