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I typically don’t buy things unless I feel they have some utility, and it seems the cheap ones likely don’t do enough to notice.


Build your own. But direct from Alibaba or mouser or digikey.

The main science behind it is to hit the absorption peaks of a mitochondrial enzyme. You can make em bright, but be limited on how long you can use it, or dim and be forced to use it constantly for the same effect.

Pulse width modulation is very important in this for penetration. High intensity allows for deeper penetration, but heats up cells causing stress. The ideal scenario is a really strong light, run at a really low duty cycle, allowing for both intensity AND low average wattage, this lessening thermal issues

There might be other mechanisms of actions, as there are so many papers that say "light good", but until they can give a mechanism of action, I'm sticking with what I know


Light is light.


Some wavelengths don't penetrate so deep, and not all bulbs are the same brightness.

I've seen obvious lies on some product descriptions on internet listings, therefore I wouldn't trust a specification claim like "x nm" or "y lumen", and unless I had tools to measure them I would not rely on them meeting those specifications.


Lumen does not measure much red light.


Lumens being perceputual brightness means any package listing it for IR is definitely lying; but that only makes it a first-pass filter, "no false positives" does not mean "no false negatives".

e.g. even when it's about visible light, well, do you trust this claim of 500,000 lumen?: https://www.amazon.de/Shadowhawk-Rechargeable-Extremely-Wate...


> do you trust this claim of 500,000 lumen?

Having watched Torque Test Channel test[0] these[1] kinds[2] of claims, no, no I do not.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp8dumORMA0

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBPQKeeYTfo

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceA5xL6ggEw


Yeah but like, don't buy from temu or something, buy from digikey etc and just wire it yourself, its cheap enough to be able to fail 20 times without costing more than a burger.




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