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I recently purchased, on a whim, some solar-powered LED garden lights. You hang them up somewhere outdoors, and during the day they soak up all that solar energy. Then as soon as it gets dark they do absolutely fuck all. They glow dimly for about half an hour, then they give up.
It occurs to me,
then, that there should be a better option. Manufacture low-power LED lamps on metal spikes, for sticking into the ground. And instead of this solar nonsense, make the spike half out of copper and half out of zinc, with a porous material between the halves. When moisture from the soil penetrates the porous material (and assuming there's some level of electrolytes in the soil water), what you have is a battery, sufficient to create a glow. Add a sensor to turn them off during daylight, and you prolong the life of the metal spike by not drawing current (and hence electrolysing the spike) when it's not needed.
Tada!
Bioluminescent_20Di...ristmas_20Ornaments
Just add a stick... [RayfordSteele, Jun 13 2017]
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// as it gets dark they do absolutely fuck all // |
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We could have told you that would happen. Serves you right for buying Metropolitan Police branded goods. But did you ask ? No, you didn't. |
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DON'T leave them alone outside. If you do, when you come back, they'll all be huddled together in a quiet corner out of the wind, sucking on ciggies and drinking coffee while bitching about the lack of overtime and watching for a non-white person to give a right kicking before fitting them up for posession. |
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That was a very smooth segue there, [8th]. |
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Ah yes. I am a fan of said large Clive, and will investigate. |
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p.s. what is a "Poundland"? |
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A place where proles congregate to enjoy the transient illusion of being meaningful consumers. |
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Don't worry about it, it's of no relevance to you whatsoever. It's like one of those charity* casino evenings where people "gamble" for modest sums, instead of entire developing countries. It would be funny if it weren't so sad. |
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*Acting altruistically with no intention of personal gain, for the benefit of the less fortunate. It's a sort of mental illness, more deserving of pity than condemnation. Thankfully, it's rare, and getting rarer. |
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//charity casino evenings where people "gamble" for modest sums, instead of entire developing countries// |
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Not necessarily "instead of". How do you think Sturton lost Lesotho? Of course he was out of his head on Snowballs at the time and thought he was wagering Midlothian. Since then, he hasn't been to a single one of the fundraisers for the Bewildered Seamen's and Pot Throwers' Alms Trust. |
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// They glow dimly for about half an hour, then they give up.// |
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You may have sited them in the wrong country. |
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What's been invented here is a single-use garden light. Once the stick's dissolved you'd have no way of recharging it. |
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Much more practical is to run an electrical cable around the perimeter of the garden a few hundred times and connect a few kilowatts of high-frequency power to it. By turning the garden into one half of a giant transformer, the garden lights would only need a small coil to suck some juice out of the massive oscillating magnetic field. |
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//Once the stick's dissolved you'd have no way of recharging it. // |
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That is true. However, I suspect that the electrodes would last for several years. |
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Alternatively, go nuclear. A phosphor-coated glass bulb filled with tritium will give off a pleasant green glow for decades. |
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Plutonium would be even better - it's in abundant supply, it's a solid rather than a gas, it's an intense alpha emitter, and it has a long half-life. |
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Yes, it will be great to have radioactive glowing sticks in our
streets, creeks and lake beds. It will add to the universe's
many juxtapositions of beauty and toxicity. |
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Like blue-ringed octupi, arrow-poison frogs, cone shells and Kim Kardashian ... |
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I didn't know mole powder could be used as a light source or fuel. |
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if solar lights actually worked you'd have the dawn chorus all feckin' night. |
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// mole powder could be used as a light source or fuel // |
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To [MB], the odour of powdered, toasted mole is a recreational drug ... |
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If you have moles already, then all you need to do here is fit
them up with some metal suits. They can then do their laps
around the garden with mitxela's electric cable. |
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Or, capture a few of those light-illuminating deep-sea
creatures. I'm sure they'd look lovely in the garden within a
properly-pressurized vessel. |
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Actually, it should be possible to engineer some photosynthetic algae that would bioluminesce... |
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We have some of those lights, they work nicely. However,
they have an LD50 of 1 winter. The cause of death is varied,
wind-induced blunt-force trauma and water ingress
followed by freeze/thaw being most common autopsy
findings. I suspect your problem is a faulty sky. My parents
have a similar problem. They solve it by relocating the lights
under a Portuguese sky, but this sky is badly lacking in Radio
4. There's no perfect solution. |
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Oh, [+] BTW... but only if you replace the silly Cu-Zn for a
redox pair that fits with common soil deficiencies. Many
soils are deficient in potassium, for example, and the
average gardener would benefit from the enhanced light
given off by plunging a large spike of metallic potassium into
wet soil. You don't even need a second electrode, an LED, or
the nasty toxic NiCd battery. |
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// lacking in Radio 4. // |
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At the end of the day, civilization is a lifestyle choice. "Et in Arcadia ego ..." |
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// plunging a large spike of metallic potassium into wet soil. // |
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// replace the silly Cu-Zn for a redox pair that fits with
common soil deficiencies // |
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You could call them 'Fertilights'. |
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This might seem totally crazy, but you could maybe even enclose the Cu-Zn pair in a sealed canister, and fill it with a liquid electrolyte - then it would work all the time, regardless of soil conditions! You could even make the sealed canister into a replaceable unit, so people could buy new ones when they run out, or even, maybe, apply electrical current to it in order to reverse the process, and "recharge" it! |
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That's just sheer fantasy, [mix]. |
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CMOT Dibbler/Pratchett would be proud. |
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