For a few years now I've been lighting our bedroom mainly with white Christmas lights strung across the ceiling. They've gotten pretty dim and burned out by now, and need replacing. But they seem to heat the room up quite a bit in summer, plus I'm getting somewhat bored with them, so I'd like to try something a little different.
Red, green, and blue light is supposed to stimulate the red, green, and blue cones in the eye to give the sensation of white in combination, so I thought it might be nice to use strings of those colors, rather than white strings. I think it'd be interesting to see colored lights when you look up at the ceiling, but essentially white down below, where the light is better mixed. But it seems like a bad idea to use conventional incandescent lighting for that, since each bulb produces a full spectrum of light which is then selectively filtered by the bulb color coating, resulting in dimmer light, warmer room, more electricity, sadder polar bears, etc.
It's my understanding, however, that LED Christmas lights are very efficient, more so since the colored ones only give out narrow-spectrum light. So I think I'd like to use them. But I have no idea about the relative intensities of the R, G, and B that LEDs give of, and thus how well they'll "fool" the cones. (And I see people complaining that "white" LEDs often seem more blue than white.) Yeah, I know, I could just buy three strings and check it out for myself, but before doing that I thought I'd ask whether anyone else has tried this before, or has any ideas on the subject. In particular, is there any way to get output specs for the strings, and use that somehow?
Also, does anyone know how many LED lights one can safely attach to an outlet?
And on a semi-related concept, after reading about how LED computer monitors work, the question occurs to me: would it be better for screen longevity and power consumption to use a desktop background that's all white, or all black? Or doesn't it make any difference?