I had an interesting idea on my walk home for lunch. So, I popped some Hot Pockets into the oven, and put it together while they where baking.
I made the box of LED christmas lights I got from Walmart into a grow light. I have been reading about LED growlights for a while now, and I want to give them a try. This is a cheap DIY way of trying it out. No soldering required. Here I marked off the box. 60 lights. That gives me 5/8ths of an inch squares centered on the box.
I punched the holes with a ball point pen.
Here I stuck all the lights through the holes. I started in the middle, and just worked back and forth across the box and towards each end.
It puts out a decent amount of light. You can see where it is blown out the CCD on the camera on the floor. The LEDs are fairly directional, so there isn’t much light lost to the sides of the ‘fixture’.
I doubt it’s enough for serious growing, but I can give the concept a try. I can daisy chain units together if I wanted to. Each one of these boxes would cost me about 3 cents a year to run year round. One light per plant. That’s pretty cheap for artificial light I think.
I have been kicking an idea around for a while. I am not sure if I saw it somewhere, read about it, found in instructable for it or what, but I have been wanting to make some bookshelf risers. So, if this is your idea, let me know. I will give credit where credit is due. Read about the next version – New Book Shelf Shelves.
Bookshelf risers – you know, bleachers for your books.
Normal bookshelves are 10 inches deep, and paperback novels are 4 inches deep. So the shelves are deep enough for 2 and a half rows of books. The shelves are also usually much taller then paperbacks as well.
In comes my riser idea. it’s a subshelf, that sits on a regular shelf, that is behind the first, outer row of books. It lifts the 2nd row of books up high enough that you can read the spines of the back row of books.
My mess of books
This is my current mess of books. The shelves are full (or at least would be), and I have 4 boxes of books waiting to be put on the shelves.
So, like any good DIYer, I made some. With cardboard… …and duct tape.
But, would a normal riser be good enough for me? NO. I need to make it more complicated. I want mine lighted. You know, so you can see the books in the back.
I just happened to pick up a good number of white LED Christmas tree light sets for real cheap tonight. So, of course, I want to use these. I mean, how cool is that, white LED lit bookshelves?
Poking the lights through the cardboard
I just punched holes into the cardboard with a ball point pen. I took the crystal bulb lens dohicky off, shoved the plug through the hole, and pluged the light/lens back in depending on what popped off when I pulled hard.
I made the homemade shelf risers using a couple of books as measuring gages. I figured how tall I wanted the riser, how deep, etc. using the books on the shelf, then used the books on the cardboard when I was scoring the folds and cutting the ends. I wanted it L shaped so that the lights could be low, and face up, and so he wire was inside. The ends got to be pretty complicated to cut & fold together. It’s kinda a big jigsaw puzzle. Way too much cardboard in that small area – like 7 layers of cardboard all wanting to be on the same layer. So I kinda had to squish the ends flat to shove the whole thing into the shelf.
Homemade cardboard bookshelf riser installed. Look at the pretty lights!
Here you can see the homemade cardboard rinky-dink subshelf installed. The lights point up. The top tips forward. Such a mess. I like in anyhow.
A row of books on the riser so you can see how it looks.
You can push the front row of books back, and there is enough room for the lights to light up behind them.
Looks good, doesn’t it? The orange thing is a portable power inverter because there isn’t an outlet nearby.
Here are both rows of books shelved. It’s pretty cool how you can see all the books now isn’t it?
Books with the lights out
Books with the lights out.
Comparing 2 rows of books both on and off the bookshelf risers
Here I have a photo with 2 rows of books on the top shelf, the outer row only 3/4 full. The lower shelf has the missing books from the top row. You can see how much better you can see all the books.
I am loving it!
One riser assembled, one cut and ready to assemble.
So, what do you do when you spend an hour trying to figure out how to make a homemade funky shape out of cardboard, and you find yourself needing to make a 2nd? You take the first one apart, copy it, and put it back together again. The 2nd one goes so terribly much faster it’s not even funny.
Lights in a bookshelf
It took a bit of doing to get 1 string of lights to work on 2 different shelves. I had to fiddle around a bit with the lights before I got them right. I had installed the lights starting on the wrong side on the top unit at first. It needs to start on the left, go to the right, so the lower one can go from right to left as the electrical outlet is to the left of the shelf.
Shelved my books back onto the shelf showing the bookshelf riser
Ah, isn’t it wonderful? I added nearly half again the usable shelf space on the bookshelf by dedicating 2 shelves to just small paperbacks and using my risers. I have the books I have read in the back, on the risers. I have some that i have read in the front too. All in all, I am quite happy with this set up.
But the coolest thing is…
back-lit bookshelf risers at night.
Is this not the coolest thing you have ever seen? Ok, so it isn’t, but it is pretty cool anyhow. Probably one of the more unique bookshelf setups around. Guaranteed it’s the neatest one purchased 100% from Walmart. You just gotta know how to make their cheap crap into nice, cheap crap.
Speaking of crappy situations. The outlet is a switched outlet. So the bookshelf lights can only be on when the main light is on. How annoying is that? I have lights that will cost a penny to run round the clock for a year, and I can’t use them that way. Oh well, probably for the better. At least you can read the books in the back row because they are not all in shadow.
Funny thing, wedding decorations. They can be found in the after Christmas clearance section at Home Depot and Walmart.
Katie said she wanted lights. White icicle lights and blue lights. The room is 108×58 give or take. That’s a lot of lights.
Good thing they are 75% off.
Me, being the retard that I am, can’t pass up a good bargain. So, I went a bit overboard. I bought over ten thousand lights. Katie’s specs only called for about 7 thousand lights. Maybe a few less. I bought extra in case there is a bad strand. No need fussing with it, just put up a different one.
I guess I will have those white icicle lights up around the whole place for the wedding – or at least 3 sides of it. There will also be blue lights along the walkway down the center of the room too I guess.
I also found some LED lights that didn’t fit into her request. I bought them anyhow. LED lights are going to be the wave of the future. I wanted some to play with.
The LED package says ‘Save 80%’. Oh really? So I ran the numbers. Yep, it’s 80% judging from the power consumption labels.
I made up a spreadsheet. I am such a geek.
I had to figure out my electricity cost, as they don’t tell you what they charge, just an uber-itemized bill that I think is designed to confuse. Disregarding the fixed costs for meter charge, etc. which is roughly $10 a month, it looks like my electricity costs roughly $0.07 per kilowatt hour.
At that rate. All the lights I bought today would cost $16 a year to run 24/7. The icicle lights are $0.38 a strand a year. The LED lights are a penny a year. Now, that’s comparing apples to peppercorns. The icicle lights have 300 bulbs per strand, the LED lights, 25. If you go bulb per bulb, and use a dozen LED strands, your still looking at around 1/3 the price – which, when you figure it without the rough rounding of the above numbers, is the 80% savings they claim on the box. Granted, the LED lights cost over 10 times more per bulb. They should have a much longer lifespan, so if they last 10 times longer then regular bulbs, they would break even just in that respect. However, regular lights use less then 1/10 of their purchase price in electricity a year.
If I did my math right, the point where LED lights are overall cheaper then regular bulbs is after running them continuously for fifty years (assuming that they both last that long). That doesn’t seem right, does it? Somebody check my math. 1 strand of 100 regular lights – $2.38. 1.33 strands of LED lights, 60 lights per string at 6.98 is $9.28 worth of string lights so we are comparing equal bulb counts. $0.19 a year difference in electricity costs (using the longer string here, three cents a year). That’s almost 50 years of continuously running the lights before you saved more in electricity then you spent on the more expensive bulbs.
Doesn’t hardly seem worth it, does it?
One thing I did notice about the LED lights. The sum of the current for the individual bulbs is 1/3 to 1/2 that of the string as a whole is rated for. That means that 1/3 to 1/2 of the electricity being used by a string of LED lights is wasted in the current limiting resisters in the string of lights.
That means, that if we can figure out how to wire them up more efficiently, they will run even more efficiently yet.
So, my cat, sister, evidently is a brand snob. It seems she likes Meow Mix over Friskies. When I am panning from the very dark shot of the Friskies to the just dark of the cats on the cat food bag, you can hear her knock over the cat food bag in her attempt to open it. She then pounces on it and tries to open it again!
I think I figured out my kitty shitty problem. Sister, bless her little feline soul, won’t use the litter box after brother has used it. I have been fighting this litter box issue since I got brother fixed. I think he ‘smells’ different and she just wont go there. This was a ‘DUH’ moment on my behalf this week.
So. This is the nail in the coffin. I need to find a new home for one of my cats. As I am not the type that cleans the litter box twice a week, much less twice a day. I also have a two week long ‘vacation’ coming up in a few short months, so I need to find arrangements to deal with that situation too. Having only one cat would help make finding arrangements for cat care during that 2 weeks easier.
Also, Katie relented, and said I can keep the cats. Being that I can’t smell, and she can (acutely, I may add), she is likely to do 99% of the litterbox duty. So in difference to her, I would like to reduce the onerous job.
If anybody knows somebody who is looking for a loving cat, I have 2 here that are very dear to my heart. You can take your pick, and we can give it a 1-2 week ‘trial’ to make sure that the human(s) acclimate themselves well to their new feline overlord.
Now how about that… I got a good jumpstart on one of my resolutions. Today I picked up 4 dozen canning jars for free! I just love freecycle. I ran them all through the dishwasher today, so they are clean. Ready to be washed again when I find a pressure canner. Katie suggested putting that on the wedding registry. Clever girl. Brother hiding in his ‘fort’. He had just defended it from an invasion of ‘cooties’ when sister stoped to investigate it. He is watching her, making shure that she doesn’t try to come back and give him more ‘cooties’.
It’s late. I should know better then to blog this late in the night.
