I was looking at trying out near red 660nm -940nm therapy and while looking at what appears to be an industry of big giant conventional light bulbs on one end and tiny, low powered led offerings, all of them, rather expensive in my opinion, perhaps blindly since I haven’t tried them.
Has anyone deconstructed these (probably poorly made) led lights and come up with a ”better clone”? I’m thinking a nice convoy host, high performance led, etc, I obviously don’t know anything about building flashlights but Durable, serviceable, better performance, etc, more value/affordable?
Or, is there a vendor that produces these that would be recommended here?
But near infrared is essentially heat. It’s the wavelengths you get from heating a piece of metal to the point where it begins to glow red.
The best way to get infrared is to just generate a lot of heat, which old fashioned bulbs are great at, and LEDs are not well suited for. The lower end, the 680nm, you can find in an LED. Above that it wouldn’t make much sense to use them
Emisar can build a number of lights with SST-20 660nm Deep Red, I have a D4V2 with them and it is great. I’ve also built 2 Convoy S2+ Triples with Cree XP-E2 emitters. One with 660nm Deep Red and one with 730nm Far Red. They work great as well. Get some diffusers from Spicy3d and you have some nice therapy lights.
There’s quite a bit of interesting science around the benefits of using this wavelength, or rather, the detriment of not having this wave length in our modern lives (sunsets and campfire)
I’m always a touch skeptical and thrifty, so I’m definitely looking for a good value to dip my toe in
You should read this thread where Glen Jeffery, who wrote the paper on Red Light and Human Vision joined the forum and discussed it some. Good reading.
Cool. I don’t know anything about it. But I can understand why it’s hard to find LEDs that cover that wavelength.
You can have monochromatic LEDs that just emit wavelengths primarily at 680nm or primarily 720nm or w/e, but to get an LED that covers the whole spectrum I imagine you would have to take a normal blue LED and coat it with a ton of red phosphors, not much red light would get through. It would take a lot of energy and generate a lot of heat to get a significant amount of light within that spectrum. And it would probably become less red over time as the phosphors degrade.
On the other hand, a traditional $2 incandescent or halogen light emit a a ton of energy in those wavelengths very easily and very cheaply so there’s probably not a huge incentive to make these LEDs like this. But correct me if I’m wrong, maybe there’s another way.
Not for specific light therapy, but if you just wanted exposure to that wavelength, you could place some old fashioned incandescent bulbs around your house. If you can still find them anywhere. They stopped selling them here except in some oddball specialty sizes. Which is inconvenient for me because a 9w LED doesn’t work well as a heat lamp for my bearded dragon lol. They need UV and IR to live.
I think the idea is that we have adapted to receive these wavelengths, and due to her modern novelty we simply don’t. We live mostly sanitary, lives indoors under LED or halogen or fluorescent lighting, which typically does not cover these wavelengths out of a lack of understanding of how we needed those. They did come in the way of incandescent bulbs, interestingly, and of course, there also wildly inefficient comparison.
I’ve seen several interesting articles recently, which led me to what do either try a flashlight, or perhaps a light panel to utilize during the sunrise and sunsets, so that I could seek some benefit or relief to what I would describe, most loosely as the effects of general aging. And if not that at least to enhance sleep, comfort and relief from pain and or slowing the degeneration of my eyesight, etc…