Fluorescent Lighting & AS

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I just popped someting up on another thread about my weirdness with color and using stobes for photography, I have no problems with the power, color, or intensity of the light, like many do. I can see the 60Hz in flourescents all day long and it does get to me after a while, but it's the same with incandescents. I'm more sensitive to sounds in general. I really don't like the green flourescents with limited or peaky spectra.

At home we have dimmers which add another high pitched sawtooth wave into the mix of 60Hz that really gets to me. I won't use the dimmers at all. I don't mind the 5500K flourescent bulbs, but the ballasts must be of high quality. I use a 2200K incandescent bulb as my reading light in bed, it's yellow, but very mellow.

I have my computer monitor set to 125Hz, I can detect 75Hz and it causes fatigue.

Fluorescents have a negative impact on my well-being and energy level. Depending on the circumstances, they can make me physically ill (nausea) or very sleepy. The ones in the training room at work are the worst - I can feel fine until I go in there for an hour, and it feels like someone drugged me. Yesterday I fought to keep my eyes open.

Has it been proven that aspies have a more pronounced reacation to fluroescent lights?

Some doctors use it as a criteria for diagnosis since the great majority of aspies have problems with florescent lighting.

I can see 75 hz as well and Ive never found an artificial light source Im comfortable with.. the only time Im comfortable is on an overcast day with dark clouds.

Fluorescent lights make my eyes ache as does glare from car lights while driving at night, also the glare from the sky depending what the weather is like, I recently saw my optician about this and have now new glasses that have a tint on them. I also have a twitch in my left eye that gets worse with glare.

I always wondered why I hated flourescent lights so much...

Incandescent lights are kind of dim, and yellow. Apparently they turn most of the electricity into heat, and just a bit into light.

Now they make halogen bulbs that screw into regular light sockets, these things are great. Almost as efficient as flourescent but a pure bright white non-flickering light.

I highly recommend them, definitely keepers.

take care,

Jester

I hate flourescent lights.

First they are very bright and second they flicker on and of continually.

BY flourescent lights I'm assuming those purple ones used to kill bugs? If so, then I don't like them either, because I can NEVER bring the light into focus. It does make all my white clothing glow purple, though !

No flourescent lights as in the tube lights usually used in commercial buildings like department stores.

The ones that flicker rapidly and are either painfully bright or paints everything a disturbing range/shade of color (or both).

Most NTs dont notice it.

Hm, must be part NT then (It's KBABZ!! By day he's NT, but by night, he's an Aspie bent on posting many posts on Wrong Planet!! !).

We have a lot of those in our school. One time me and a friend were walking down a hallway and the fluorescent light just above us burst into a million peices. We just looked at each other in silence, then quietly moved on...

Interesting thing. My science teacher said that the room he was working in wasn't particularly designed for teaching. Why? Well, in all the other rooms of the school the reflection of the lights make a 'perspective point' towards the board, drawing your attention to it (as the mind always follows lines). But in this room the lights were pointing towards the walls, so your attention is drawn to them, not to mention being blocked a lot more. Cool, eh?

I don't mind the smaller compact ones like those long life ones that fits into standard incadescent light sockets and even some of those compact doughnut shaped ones with a light shade covering them. But I cannot stand those long naked tubes that are bright and nasty, and flicker at the ends, and hum and drive me crazy

How about analog light?

Does anyone really like candles for soft lighting like I do?

Auw, you don't know how much I like candle lighting! It makes me feel more secure. I'd do it myself, but you ruin the candles and I have a nervous disposition around fire.

I always buy flourescent fixtures with electronic ballasts to avoid the 60hz flicker (and hum). The electronic ballasts run at something like 20000hz and the bulbs also last longer because of the more sophisticated operation.

I've also been known to change other people's PC monitor settings from 60hz to 70 or 75hz refresh if I have to use them.

I apologize for resurrecting an old topic, but I didn’t want to wantonly start a new one. I was wondering if anyone could better explain to me the United States’ planned phase out of incandescent lighting. CFLs give me many of the flicker problems that you guys have described. I was also wondering about whether or not natural spectrum lights give off UV radiation. I’m extremely phobic.

For that matter, don’t fluorescent lights give off some kind of UV radiation? I’ve heard it was negligible.

They flicker for me...I also see halos around lights at night. I remember when I was a kid I always tried to put my head on my desk and I would get in trouble and get sent out to the hallway. Stupid teachers, thats where I wanted to be, It was quiet and dark .

Fluorescent lights always made me sick to my stomach - some more than others. I assume when I felt it stronger, the lights were newer? Maybe were more powerful? I remember this in childhood. My husband says the same thing (I am pretty sure he is AS, although his therapist said no, but he was not a specialist and had a lot of misinformation about spectrum disorders.)

Full spectrum lights also seem to make me feel ill - they just make me feel strange, I can't describe it.

Regular lights are okay, which is too bad since they are so hot in summer time.

Are there any lights which are cool temperature in use but do not make people sick?!

Oh seeing the post above this one - I see halos around lights at night also, I have for a long time. I only noticed it though when I read it was unusual. I read something about van Gogh and it being unusual (he paints lights that way because that's how he saw lights.) Until I read something about it I had thought nothing of it, I thought everyone did. Some people who have had lasik see halos too but I have not had lasik.