Incandescent? Flourescent?

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I am forced by my college's dorm to use flourescent lighting...

I'm not sure if there's a correlation, since so many other factors vary; but during the summers, when I live in my own rented room with incandescent lights (and lots of them--I have three or four lamps on at all times, except when I'm asleep!), I seem to have a much lower stress level. It's as though the air itself is somehow calmer... though it isn't really the air; more of the... ambiance, I guess you'd say?

I don't think it's the sound of the flourescents; I have a lot of background noise in my room, and a lot of noise in the dorm; so I make sure that the noise is of the steady sort I can tolerate; my computer is always on, and when I'm asleep I turn on my fan for more "steady" noise. So I can't consciously hear the flourescent lights.

Maybe it's the sort of spectrum you get from the flourescents--they way they make everything look harsh and dull at the same time. I wish I could describe it better; but that's the way things look. It's as though it isn't "real" light--though of course I can see by it just as I can see by sunlight or incandescent lights.

Sorry about all the imprecise speech; I'm having trouble describing sensations here. Maybe someone else can narrow it down for me, if it's similar for them.

Last edited by Callista on 25 Apr 2006, 4:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Fluorescent bothers me quite a bit. There's some fluorescent lighting in my basement (hangout area), and I always feel the need to turn them off. There's also incadescent down here.

If I had it my way, I'd line the ceiling with strips of LED lights, red green and blue. Then, I would have my computer control them, allowing me to set any color in the spectrum, to set the mood.

From what an engineer friend mentioned today, LEDs would have the same migraine-inducing effect as fluorescents, unless you run them on DC power. For that matter, fluorescents might be tolerable if run on DC. It seems that LEDs run on a simple rectifier base still get the 60hz flicker, and if you're sensitive to the flicker of a fluorescent, you'll be sensitive to the LED flicker, too.

The only way to avoid it would be to put in a DC circuit just for lighting.

Stick with golf ball tubes and flashlights.

At home I use warm white compact fluorescent lamps, and I don't find that they flicker or bother me. I don't like fluorescent strip lighting, it makes me irritable and stressed.
I work in a lighting store, and it's mostly dark but lit by a combination of fluorescent, incandescent, halogen and a small amount of leds. That suits me fine, I'm much happier working there than at the store I used to work at, which was mainly cool fluorescent lighting.

If you use an electronic ballast, over a standard B2 ballast, it's supposed to help reduce flickering, but that depends on who you talk to. You can also get a special green type of tube for migraine sufferers, but again I've not tried them.

Welllll....duh! What did they think would happen?

LED's can't be run from AC. Flourescents can't run from DC. The "DC" flourescent fixtures you might find in motor homes convert the DC to high-voltage high-frequency AC for the flourescent tubes.



That would be "pulsating DC" which isn't a very good way to run LEDs. Any type of AC voltage should be converted to filtered and regulated DC before being used with a LED.

Unless your going to use batteries, you need at the bare minimum, a few low ohmage resistors and some medium size electrolytic capacitors to filter the noise out of rectified DC current.

Or even better yet, you could build a power supply around the LM317-T voltage regulator which would give you easy electronic dimming capacity with a few modifications.

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