“This is what I did recently. I got the idea from Cody Lundin’s house. My apartment doesn’t get much sunlight and almost no direct sunlight. So I basically placed a mirror outside my window on the patio. The sunlight bounces off the mirror and hits the ceiling and lights up the room. The quality of the light is great. Costs: $6 mirror at Home Depot, almost nothing. I googled this exact topic and found almost nothing. I thought it was super neat.” Thanks, Mark Lazaro
Send your tips to Owen at natural houses [at] gmail.com.
This is not as impressive as Genesis 1:3-4
However, for a town that has never had any sunlight in winter in all of history, it’s no small accomplishment.
http://metro.co.uk/2013/10/24/let-there-be-light-sun-starved-town-builds-giant-mirrors-to-warm-pale-residents-during-winter-months-4159956/
5 Million Norwegian Kroner works out to $805670 US Dollars.
Seems a bit pricey for some mirrors and some trackers, but that’s to be expected from a government project. Gotta pay for all those kickbacks for the politicians, ya know.
Thanks for the tip! Mirrors are great in general for making tiny living spaces feel less claustrophobic. In the western world we are going to have to start living in much smaller spaces, so strategic placement of mirrors will be clutch.
Actually, there is a very large amount of information on the internet on this topic.
Try Googling “Heliostat”
That is what this type of device is called. In this particular instance, it is not an automated tracking Heliostat, but a stationary one.
Heliostats have a very wide range of uses: lighting, heating, boosting the light on Solar Thermal and Solar Photovoltaic panels, and many more uses.
Build It Solar has a section dedicated to Heliostats of various types.
http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Concentrating/concentrating.htm#Heliostats
YouTube has a large number of videos showing DIY Heliostats, as well as commerical versions, and even large industrial ones.
Heliostats can be extremely simple, such as illustrated by this blog post, to extremely complex requiring computer controls with exotic safety systems to prevent the light from being reflected to an unwanted area starting fires.
Thanks for the comment. I didn’t make the connection between heliostats and a simple mirror.
Owen, you’ve been living in Paradise for so long that you’ve forgotten history! We used to “bounce” light into caves, in Cambodia and Laos.
And, we sometimes bounce light into the depths of ISBUs to help make them comfortable and airy…
Double that light up with “shiny” interior cladding like light colored tile or even something like a mirrored set of closet doors and you can work miracles…
It’s easy to shoot that sunlight approximately 20′ feet or more into an interior, if you think it through.
And why am I suddenly craving Thai food? It’s only 9am! :)
That’s a good point about using mirrors and light colored interiors to further improve daylighting.