a continuation of Teh Snot

I have Teh Snot still/again. What I think happened is that my cold went away, and I either caught another one straight on top of it, or this is really severe allergic rhinitis. I don't know which, but my nose is running like a tap while my ears are completely stuffed up and congested. I've been awake an hour and got through more than 10 "man-size" tissues already.

Both echinacea and zinc do terrible things to my digestive system. I'm also vaguely under the impression that one or both of them don't mix well with allergies - where the problem isn't so much a "bad" immune system so much that the immune system is busy fighting the wrong things. I already take a good multivitamin, and extended-release vitamin C, combined with a pretty good diet containing multiple fruits & vegetables and industrial quantities of innocent smoothies. I've started washing my hands religiously when I get in from "the outside", even if I don't think I've touched anything. Beyond that... um.

The only sensible thing I can think of is not to go out or see people when I can't reliably breathe through my nose, as breathing through your mouth bypasses a lot of the respiratory tract's cilia and mucus cells, so makes you far, far more likely to catch an inhaled virus. But that means cancelling a lot more work than I currently do, which'll be inconvenient to students and leave me short of money, so it's not really that sensible. But I really do not need constant Snot for a couple of months of the year, nor the threat of chronic fatigue due to hyperventilation or resurgent Epstein-Barr. There must be something I can do to improve my immune system, surely?

request for advice about lightboxes

After a couple of months of feeling blah which hasn't improved, I recognise that the dawn simulator alarm clock I have just isn't enough to deal with my SAD this year. Lying in bed with the full light of it streaming into my eyes barely improves my functionality. I feel like I'm living in perpetual twilight, and have very little inclination to do anything.

But I have a problem with buying a lightbox. I'm very environmentally conscious. Every room in this house, bar the kitchen, is lit with low energy fluorescent bulbs because I want to consume as little electricity as possible. I really don't want to use a lightbox that's running at 200 W for an hour a day, because that's like leaving every light in the house on for an hour a day. And I'm having great trouble finding out the energy consumption of different lightboxes from seller's websites. Some of them mention a 55 W fluorescent tube, or 2 x 80 W bulbs, but others simply say things like "LED lights consume only 1/10 the power of conventional incandescent lights, yet are 10 times brighter". Great, wonderful, white LEDs are lower energy than ordinary lightbulbs - but are they lower energy than a fluorescent tube? And more to the point, are they as good for SAD?

So, uh, if anyone knows someone I can talk to about this, or a retailer that details the energy consumption of every lightbox so I can make a fair comparison, that'd be great. (I simply don't have the energy to visit individual manufacturer's websites to try to take in information :/ )