request for advice about lightboxes

[baratron]

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 :/ )

Comments

[otterylexa.livejournal.com]

x_mass has an Apollo GoLite P1 (http://www.electronichealing.co.uk/products/sad_golite.htm), which has a 6x11 array of blue LEDs. Don't know much about it.