Life: 10 x 10

The one thing that Katy and I constantly bicker about is lights. I have very good low-light vision, and hers is almost non-existent. As such, when the lights are good for her, they’re usually too bright for me, and when they’re good for me, she’s essentially blind. Add on top of it the fact that I have a different visible spectrum than her, and it’s a constant struggle to find the lighting that makes us both happy. The answer has been sunlight. We both see great in sunlight, and it’s never too bright for me. Unfortunately, when the sun sets, the struggle resumes.

In our current (too huge) apartment, there’s some halogen track lighting. We agree it looks great, but they draw a total of 450W, making them one of the highest-draw devices in the apartment. I noticed that some of the reflected light from them has UV in it, and came up with the hypothesis that what makes lights pleasing to people isn’t just the visible spectrum, but also the UV.

In order to test this, I picked up a few RGB (red, green, blue combo) LEDs. I already have a few UV ones. I’m building a simple, variable-brightness control panel to drive the four colors adjustably, since if it works, it’ll be VERY efficient, custom-tunable lighting for the tiny house. I can picture three or four knobs, each adjusting a color channel. People could adjust the lights to whatever looks best to them. And Katy and I could finally have energy-efficient lighting that doesn’t bother either of us.

Also, last time I was in Home Depot browsing around, I found some christmas lights with a solar panel, as a kit. It was about a 4×6 panel and 50 simple LED lights. Seeing that many lights driven from a teensy little panel makes me think of tiny house lighting, so we could have low-impact, pseudo-full-spectrum lights in tiny houses, adjustable to each person’s tastes. Now I just need to find my box of resistors and try this out…