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Efficient light pipes require solar concentration and thus tracking. That will drive costs up. Current residential/office light pipes are using only small fract
by rini17 7y ago
Efficient light pipes require solar concentration and thus tracking. That will drive costs up. Current residential/office light pipes are using only small fraction of sunlight, so they aren't relevant to this problem at all.
Also you haven't said anything about cooling, which the translucent roof inevitably requires in summer.
- kragen 7y agoThese are good points. Lightpipes can use non-imaging optics in many cases and thus avoid the need for tracking, but maybe not in this case, and I hadn't thought about that. Cooling, though, is an issue whether your light comes from LEDs or the sun—either way it comes with a lot of extra heat. With the LEDs I'm familiar with, this is a worse problem than with sunlight, but in another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20908476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20908476 I see a report that there are now illumination LEDs that reach an astounding 40–50% efficiency level. If that's true, it would make the LED cooling problem a little smaller than the sunlight cooling problem, instead of much bigger; and of course spectral matching helps.