5 Futuristic Lighting Designs That May Soon Transform Your Home

The following is a guest post by TheNewEcologist.com.

Light. We need it to function every single day. We use it during sunlight hours and at night to provide illumination to the darkest corners of our indoor spaces. But lighting traditional lamps and bulbs requires electricity, most of which is derived from dirty sources like coal.

So here are some innovative ideas that are changing the lighting landscape.

1. Day_Night Lamp by Od-Do Arhiteckti

Get into solar with one of these futuristic Day_Night lamps by Od-Do Arhiteckti, two female designers/architects from Belgrade, Serbia. Lighting makes up one of the bigger drains on our electric bills, so powering your light fixtures with solar can help you save money down the line. This beauty needs no cord to tether it to the grid, so you can put it anywhere.

The lamp has built-in photovoltaic cells and an on-board battery to store the energy until the evening. Simply tilt the collectors to take full advantage of the sun, then reposition the lamp after dark to light-up your indoor space. The LED light bulbs used in the system make it supremely efficient.

2. LED EcoBulb by Seokjae Rhee

LEDs (light-emitting diodes) will definitely become common light fixtures in homes around the world in the coming decades. They're ultra-energy efficient (much more than compact fluorescents) and provide a very good quality of light. This new fixture by Seoul, Korea-based Seokjae Rhee is one of the more interesting ones recently released. It can be modified on the fly to provide light exactly where you want it.

According to the designer, "the bulb has six distinct sections to it, and via the remote control you can change the brightness and direction of the lights. The theory is that we use many bulbs and light sources in a room and most of the time they are unnecessary. This one bulb can be powerful enough to illuminate the entire room or segments which light-up required areas only."

3. Liquileds

LEDs are showing up all over the place, from Olympic ceremonies to traffic lights. Another exciting new innovation is Taiwan-based Liquidleds. One of the biggest challenges with any lighting technology, including LEDs, is to minimize the amount of energy wasted to heat.

With a regular incandescent bulb, about 90% of all the energy drawn by the bulb is converted into wasted heat, which is why they are so incredibly inefficient (they also add to indoor cooling loads in summer). CFLs do a better job at staying cool, as do LEDs, although LEDs must still be cooled (and have the added challenge of producing heat at the base, which is harder to dissipate). So Liquidleds has taken the interesting step of encasing the lights in liquid-filled, incandescent-shaped bulbs. They can be used for a variety of applications, and look kind of cool, too.

The bulbs should be available on the company website soon. They are guaranteed to last more than 30,000 hours and consume only 2.3 watt of electricity. They are dimmable and replace a 15- or 20-watt incandescent bulb. Liquidleds come in a variety of standard screw bases, in two shapes and in two color temperatures.

4. Tubular Skylights

And if you want a way to illuminate your indoor space with natural sunlight but can't get a window to interior rooms, then you'll want to look into installing tubular skylights. Like regular skylights, these are installed on your roof to bathe your rooms with natural sunlight.

But instead of clear glass, they are fitted with diffusers that scatter the light into your indoor spaces. And since they have reflectors inside the tubes, they can bounce light from your rooftop deep inside your home, several floors down. Popular installer options include Solatube, VELUX's SUN TUNNEL, and the SunPipe.

5. Bic Biro Chandelier

For a bit of the extraordinary, check out this chandelier constructed of clear polystyrene barrels of 347 recycled Bic pens (hey, we already know pens are better than computer printers). The Bic Biro Chandelier as it is being called, also makes use of 347 paper clips and was designed by Spanish design company enPieza.

Also from TheNewEcologist.com:

• Renewable Energy Sources for Dummies
• Top 10 Reasons to Buy Organic Products for Your Home
• The Most Exciting Developments in Green Cell Phones

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