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The bright stove






Two problems can occur to people in wintertime: their houses get freezing cold and they get depressed because of the lack of sunlight. I wonder if both problems can be addressed by a same device.

Most modern houses in cold countries have some heating device beneath each window. The simplest kind of heating devices are electric radiators. What about using electric lamps instead of traditional heating elements ? When you switch on the heating in the morning, that makes several kilowatts of electric consumption. Those same kilowatts, fed into halogen lamps, would make a tremendous amount of light. Exactly what you need to feel in summertime.

Feeding halogen lamps instead of heating elements will warm up the room almost the same way, for a given consumption of energy. A part of the energy is not radiated the same way, so there will be differences. I believe lots of people heat their rooms too much in the morning for psychological reasons, to feel a little better. I hope the halogen lamps will allow for more well-being for less temperature and energy consumption.

The exact way the halogen lamps should be placed is a matter of design. They can even be placed on the windows themselves. Or they can be placed on the ceiling and their heat be air ducted towards the windows.

What should happen once the appropriate room temperature is reached? No way the halogen lamps be constantly switched off and on according to the room temperature. I assume slow changes in the brightness will be felt as "natural" by the inhabitants, even if the light is tenfold dimmer an hour later.

I suppose both halogen lamps and conventional heating elements should be used, for the moments the inhabitants desire a warm yet darker inside. Or the halogen lamps can be hidden by infrared radiative plates. Also, more halogen lamps can be used than strictly necessary, so they can be dimmed down to the point they produce mostly infrared light.

Light from halogen lamps has to be filtered against harmful ultraviolet wavelengths. I got eye problems with a minute 50 W unfiltered halogen desk lamp, I shiver thinking about what 5 kW of unfiltered halogen lamps could do.

Halogen lamps are cheap and powerful. Now what about neon lamps? They produce much more light for a same energy consumption. The main difference with halogen lamps is most of the energy will be radiated in the room before being turned into heath. Other differences have to be taken into account :
What about houses heat by natural gas ? They can use a cogen to first turn the gas into electricity. The heat of gas flames can also be turned into light directly. Some city lighting systems operate that way but I don't know the yield and the drawbacks.

The comfort of a house depends on many things: humidity, acoustic insulation, repartition and nature of the heath... Some modern ecologic houses rely on huge windows to let sunlight in during wintertimes.


An alternative to producing light would be to produce computations. Electric stoves would be replaced by networked motherboards. Whenever the stove is activated, the motherboards would start receiving computations to perform. Like meteorological computations to help undertstand the global warming.



Eric Brasseur  -  January 1 2007  till  February 16 2009