Natural light in the home or work spaces is very important to save electricity or even to save on heating. Due to location, however, many rooms in a home or office may not have natural light. The solution for this problem is make use of a heliostat system; a device that includes a mirror to reflect light to those areas where there is none. This invention, however, goes one step further and even allows you to heat your home for free.
Is called Lumona, and has been created by a Polish industrial designer called Mariusz Smietana. The invention has even been nominated for the international James Dyson awards.
It consists of a heliostat that is installed on the roof of the home and is capable of bringing natural light to the most remote corners of the house. However, unlike devices that project sunlight, Lumona includes a system that can – in a way – store the sun’s rays tosubsequently distribute them to the necessary rooms through a fiber optic system.
For this, the device has 16 Fresnel lenses, which are used to capture or expand light, as well as aluminum collimators so that it is captured with greater precision. Finally, they are placed on a polycarbonate base and milled aluminum as a term shield. The inventor, in fact, states that “milled aluminum was chosen, which, when properly processed, has optical properties and becomes a natural heat sink, minimizing the risk of melting the optical fiber.”
Lumona can heat your house for free and, in the future, even distill water
The fiber optic system, for its part, allows natural light to be distributed to those rooms where there is none. This not only creates a warmer environment. It also saves on heating, since the light can warm the environment; as well as save electricity, since it is not necessary to use artificial light. Lumona may also be beneficial for plants that need sunlight to live.
Now, Smietana focuses on improving his invention, which already saves a large amount of money each year by distributing sunlight and heating a house for free, since its use is completely free. “I plan to focus on simplifying the system to make it more economically accessible to less developed countries,” said the inventor. Smietana also highlights that he is coming up with new designs, “such as producing lenses and fiber optics from PET bottles, which will help reduce production costs, facilitating access to the necessary components.”
Finally, the inventor hopes to give Lumona one more use, that of making the stored sunlight also be used for other purposes, such as distilling water or heating crops.