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A parallel universe where William Osman still post in his main channel:
My gf has been dealing with this with her shower for the past 2 weeks without any extra device. Showering there is an experience.
Lol
One might think this would make us evolve to being able to withstand hotter or colder temps (depending on the perspective). But no! People are far less forgiving than that.
I was in a band called Extreme Sensory Hell Shower.
We randomly switched between German Schlager, Doom Metal, Muzak, Swing, Acid Jazz, Reggae, Polka, Latin Dance, Bluegrass, and Hard House WITHIN tracks to make sure that nobody was ever having a positive experience for more than a few seconds at a time.
And no, we weren’t especially proficient or even enthusiastic about any of the genres.
A temperature knob could be added to control the pulse width. Get this shower to everyone who designed LED lighting with PWM frequency below 100 Hz.
So you can actually do LED lighting that doesn’t cause PWM headaches. It’s just cheaper not to.
Fuck PWM
All my homies hate PWM
Signed: DC dimming gang
So the concerns related to LED frequencies are real?
I saw some chatter about them causing headaches, eye strain, and disturbing circadian rhythms, but I hadn’t looked further into it to see if it was legit or a “you should use red light on your balls” health influencer type of thing.
I would get headaches from watching PAL (50Hz) CRT TVs for a long time. 60Hz monitors were noticeably better, and 75 or more was good to endure all day. Modern screens don’t go blank between refreshes (except PWM-based AMOLED) so the refresh rate is mostly irrelevant unless you want to shave off a few milliseconds of latency for serious gaming (then it’s best to match the refresh, render FPS and video signal).
But as I’m walking down the street and move my eyes, I notice cheap lighting whose drivers don’t smooth the 100Hz ripple of rectified AC. Especially if they reach 0% brightness during the ripple. This applies to:
- sodium and mercury vapor lights in street lamps
- single-board (aka mains-voltage) LED modules in cheap, powerful reflectors
- any LED bulb or fixture with a constant-current driver whose mains smoothing capacitor is too small or has failed due to heat (however, some such as EMOS and Solight spherical 18W ones refuse to turn on if the capacitor gets too bad, making for an easy repair)
- any dimmable light powered from DC (like 12V and 24V non-addressable LED strips with those cheap flat remotes, or multi-mode flashlights) whose manufacturer was too cheap for a constant-current driver (fair enough) but could have very easily set a higher PWM frequency YET DIDN’T and therefore deserve a PWM shower.
- This is especially annoying with RGB ones because the hue changes during the cycle, creating off-color fringes or even “rainbows” when moving my eyes. I can’t believe some people use things like that in/on/around their battlestation: this would totally distract me as my eyes dashed around the monitor while gaming.
- multiplexed displays, especially with low duty cycles (look up charlieplexing, chances are your powerbank or similar gadget uses that to minimize the pin count of its chip) - these are usually over 100 Hz though
So yeah, it’s not unhealthy, especially above 60 Hz. But it’s annoying for me to look around badly smoothed Christmas lights. And if they are of different phases (this is uncommon for Christmas lights (and even impossible in most American homes because they have 180° aka split-phase 240 V, not 120° 400 V) but always the case with multiplexed displays), I say a long rolling R to vibrate my face and see them wiggle.
When very drunk, I’ve seen the flicker of normally-functioning fluorescent lights and was theorizing whether my “nervous system was desynchronizing” or if it was nystagmus-related, or if there was even a difference between those two.
The ends of fluorescent tubes with traditional EM ballasts flicker at 50/60 Hz because the filaments take turns being the cathode and anode, which is perceptible in peripheral vision. And some long tubes have waves on their arcs, causing travelling ripples of bright spots. But without a more advanced ballast, there’s just the phosphor smoothing the 100/120 Hz ripple, which is not very effective (and usually, yellow phosphor lasts longer than blue, resulting in color banding in video) but that’s not normally perceptible.
I never thought alcohol would make the braon work faster though, thanks for sharing!
Wait, I’m a specialist lighting designer and i haven’t heard about this < 100hz LED is bad stuff. From my experience, frequencies at around 50hz or lower is what usually causes eye strain/headaches etc.LEDs are typically 60hz.
I’m guessing the >100hz crowd just need to go outside and touch grass for a few hours a day.
I’m guessing the >100hz crowd just need to go outside and touch grass for a few hours a day.
Has to be 8k 240fps grass, though.
50Hz is what you’ll find in the UK and Europe.
LEDs aren’t 50Hz or 60Hz or anything else. They’re DC devices and they don’t flicker at all if you run them on a clean DC power supply.
The issue with LED bulbs is that they don’t have clean power supplies. They have very simple AC to DC, usually a capacitive dropper. Without filtering, this type of cheap power supply produces a lot of ripple which manifests in visible flicker at the same frequency of the input AC mains power.
Yup. Except they flicker at double the mains frequency because they use both the positive and negative half-cycle thanks to a FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER.
And see my other comment: it’s not unhealthy, just annoying. To be honest, I use trash-picked LED bulbs and repair them, and I don’t normally care to replace a poor smoothing capacitor. In rooms I spend much of my time, I make sure most bulbs in the fixture are low-flicker (it’s arbitrary but generally don’t get below 75%) for comfort. I’m not peculiar about light quality like CRI and matching color temperature unless it’s very obviously bad, although I do notice the circadian effects of cold white light. I do mark badly flickering bulbs though so I know not to put too many of them together unless it’s somewhere non-consequential like a cellar. I also hold my phone camera to any neutral-white E27s I salvage to find and mark true flicker-free ones because I use them while filming.
That just means the driver is not flicker free, not the LED board itself, and there are flicker free drivers out there but they’re just not available for the average consumer.
But visible flicker? On an LED that’s just emitting light? I’ve never seen that before. Maybe it’s a UK and Europe thing.
I live in Canada (60Hz here) and I just installed a new range hood above my stove. It came with standard recessed halogen light fixtures with LED bulbs. Rather than being fully dimmable, the switch has high and low settings. When set to low, I can definitely see visible flicker.
I also have this same style of lights above my bathroom mirror and a dimmer switch there. They also display more and more flicker when dimmed.
Ah. That’s a driver issue again. The dimmer is adjusting the voltage, and it the voltage dips too low, the LED chips don’t have enough juice to run. Hence the flickering. If there is a driver attached to your LEDs, you might want to consider a 0-10V driver or one that specifically says flicker free.
EldoLED drivers are excellent for this but costly because they’re commercial grade.
There’s no driver. These are bulbs designed for traditional halogen fixtures which connect directly to 120V mains AC.
Poorly made LEDs actually flicker at 120Hz on 60Hz mains, see my other comment. And it’s more like a pet peeve, only below 60 Hz is actually headache-inducing. Unless it’s specific circumstances (I couldn’t stand a cheap 120Hz PWM RGB strip close to a gaming monitor because I’d see annoying “rainbows” as my eyes dash across the screen). More details in my other comments.
Very interesting! My pet peeve is glare and LEDS produce an ungodly amount of glare and I absolutely hated them in car headlights. I’ve never heard of anyone irritated by hz that high before. The more you know. Thanks for clarifying.
Glare? That’s not a physical property of LED light but an effect of overly bright headlights enabled by LED and laser technology.
I once touched an experiment in the form of a metal wire coil where each alternative loop was hot and the other cold. It felt superhot instead. I feel like this would be similar.
SUPER
HOT
You can recreate this with sausages or some cooked vegetables. We do it at science fairs.
Set them up in an alternating pattern of cold, hot, cold, hot. Let somebody place their arm on top. They’ll feel like they just got a severe burn, even though they’re fine and the sausages are not hot enough to cause any harm.
If it oscillates that fast, it might not feel very different from a normal shower
This could be better than existing pressure balance based mixing systems, assuming it allows you to adjust the hot vs cold pulse width
Pulse Water Modulation
Thermostatic is dead. Embrace thermovariable.
I currently need to replace my showers mixing valve. When will this product be available?
Unfortunately it is stuck at 10⁻¹⁴M and a gamma producer.
I can make this worse. The Katy Perry song Hot N Cold starts playing full blast every time you turn the shower on.
I can make it better by changing it to Heart and Soul by Huey Lewis and the News. Which does contain the lyric, “She’s hot and cold” but also contains the lyric, “hot lovin’ every night,” and so is infinitely better.
That’s from their album Sports! It has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost.
He’s been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.
I never quite got this monologue. I think the idea was that the character was reciting someone else’s review of these musicians, as if it were his own sophisticated take. But in what world is Huey Lewis at all bitter and cynical especially compared to Elvis Costello?
Patrick and his clique are a bunch of superficial morons who have no idea what they’re talking about a lot of the time. They blindly follow popular trends, do what everyone else does and say what everyone else says. They have no personal opinions and are too shallow to form any. Guy probably sat down and wrote that “analysis” by imitating other people’s reviews of other media, and then memorized it to recite at people. The discussion they have at that dinner is like that too. They’re just regurgitating rehearsed and memorized statements about some social issues they clearly know nothing about and don’t care at all.
Is that the scene where Batman kills the Joker with an axe?
why would hot n cold playing (good) make the extreme sensory hell shower (good) worse?
“Worse” means better. It’s Gen Alpha slang. It’s like sick, bad, nasty, gnarly, phat, etc
acclimatization
Add some menthol and capsaicin to the body wash too, just for an extra “fuck you” even after the shower.
It probably already exists at CIA black sites
Also in my bathroom.
There’s something wonky with the water pressure on the cold side. Think I need a bigger tank or something. Pump runs very often and short spans, so the pressure oscillates. Hot water from the boiler is fairly consistent in comparison.
If you want cursed showers you should see how Latin America provides hot water to their showers
Wait, what?
Electric heating element in the shower head.
Wat
It sounds scary, but there’s no direct path to the electricity since there is no laminar flow between you and the showerhead and most of the water that is passing over the showerhead is not especially electrically conductive because there are no salts mixed into it that don’t come directly from the water plant.
It has to actually have a mechanical fault that doesn’t cause the shower heater to stop working and you have to come physically into contact with the shower head while that fault is going on in order for you to get zapped.
But it is possible for you to get zapped by them, and some people have died, I am sure, although I don’t personally have any proof.
Electroboom has a good video on them.
“Suicide showers”
That kills fewer people than gas heaters…
On the other hand, I’ve yet to hear anyone being killed by a regular shower head.
Legionella just entered the chat. If your hot water isn’t hot enough you might be breeding them in your water lines and aerosolizng with your shower head.
I’d think Legionella is a lot less of a problem with suicide showers.
You mean one with only cold water?
The rest of the world makes the water warm before it goes to the shower head
Do they wash dishes in cold water? Idk if my hands would like that more or less my well comes out like 38°
With what? A gas heater? I remember I’ve made a comment about those.
Do they use electric pumps as Britain does?
Britain has 2 showerheads 50cm apart from each other. One has cold, the other hot water
Obligatory, my plumbing is older than your country.
This but with an acid and a base
truly chaotic neutral
I oscillate between chaotic good and chaotic evil. Like the shower. You just witnessed a chaotic evil idea.
Guess your final pH when you switch off the shower.
Probably varies wildly by body part
You call it “sensory hell”, but a grifting entrepreneur somewhere is putting together an ad campaign for “Natural healing PulseHead shower! Just $69.99! Comes with our satisfaction guarantee!”
I once had a shower that did this on its own.
I figured that’s the joke, isn’t it?
Also, I’m in the same boat. My current one does it whenever someone uses water elsewhere in the flat.
Alternating hot and cold can actually be good.
It’s invigorating. - Have you never jumped from a hottub into a cold pool or vice versa?
I believe it can also help with soreness.
I went on a 10 day hike in Canada and the last day had a sauna on the lake. Jumping into the cold water and back into the sauna was amazing.
It can also give you cardiac arrest!
Just about anything can give you cardiac arrest if you’re unhealthy.
Haha just reading your comment cou
