"Andrew Gabriel" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Mungo \"Two Sheds\" Toadfoot" writes:
Are they A Good Thing for cheering up a kitchen through the winter, and

Definitely not. They have the most appalling effect on the colour
of food, and unless you lined the ceiling with loads of tubes to
get the lighting level up to that of midday sun, the colour will
look wrong.

possibly having a beneficial effect on the symptoms of SAD? I'm having
some
bother finding a 6' one locally but if they're worth having I'll continue
the search.

SAD needs a bright light. There's no evidence colour makes a scrap
of difference, but the manufacturers of special lights like you to
think it does so you'll buy their very expensive replacement tubes.

One 6' tube mounted on the ceiling probably isn't anywhere near
enough to make any difference. If you want to make a SAD lamp, the
cheapest way is probably to buy a 4-tube modular ceiling luminare
designed to sit on a 600mm ceiling tile frame (either 600mm square
or 600x1200mm). They're dirt cheap from an electrical wholesaler
and often free from a skip. You can hang it on the wall like a
picture next to where you sit/work, like a sort of fake window.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

I used to know someone who had a 250W tungsten lamp in a white painted bog
not much bigger than a shoe box. Certainly woke me up!

I find that sufficient wake up brightness can be obtained with halogen
downlighters in a white painted bath/shower room. Add the reviving
influence of splashing water to the brilliance of the lamps and you should
come out feeling a whole lot better. [One proviso is to make sure the
transformers on the downlighters are able to take any wattage that is likely
to be plugged into them. The ones that were fitted in our kitchen were only
meant for 20W lamps, something that the fitter failed to mention, resulting
in some interesting on and off cycling of the lamps as they were gradually
replaced with 30W ones without realising.]

S