First post from a Scoobynet DIY forum newbie !

I'm about to have a conservatory added to the back of my house - approx 8m by 3m.

One of the 3m walls is going to be breeze block faced by natural stone with the internal wall plaster boarded and skimmed on the internal.

Now I want to use this blank wall as a bit of a lighting feature and want to be able to "wash" the wall with light of a varying brightness and (here's the cool part) colour.

Has anyone any ideas of what I need to do this. I guess I could easily get the variations in brightne from some standard halogen up / downlighters and a dimmer switch but how do I get the colour ?

TIA

Andy

Colour, hmm, you're going to have to use a motorised filter wheel on top or have multiple coloured lights (red / green / blue) and fade them up and down to get the colours you want.

Just a point: make sure your halogen transformer supports dimming. Everything I've seen recently does, but you can bet your bottom dollar that if you didn't specify dimming... ;)

Good luck with this. It could look brilliant, or a bit pony - not sure which yet :D

No doubt about it - it will look brilliant :D

I recon a plain white wall during the day with the opportunity to change the colour / brightness at night will look fantastic from the garden and it will defintely bring to life the natural stone that will form the back wall of the conservatory.

I did wonder about a motorised filter over halogen but then each light source begins to get a bit bulky and I need to do a bit more work to hide them to keep nice clean lines

I've been doing a bit of a trawl of light suppliers and recon that fibre optics might now be the way to go.

There are some cool looking fibre optic kits at http://www.unlimitedlight.com/product.htm. A brochure is on its way as I type but I've no idea of costs yet

The UK HA mailing list (web-site here (http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/)) had a bulk-buy on some fancy lights that change colours - electronicalli I believe. You can look through the archives - I'll dig out the brand name of th kit - but my main pc id fubar'd at the mo so I cant get to my mail.

Deano

Blair,

The fibre optic kits are not cheap I'm afraid. If you want to go the fibre route, much cheaper to go DIY, i.e. buy the light source and fibre as required. Also, take a look at this USA Site (http://www.fiberopticproducts.com/) for more ideas that are fibre related

Another easy option is the Mathos (http://www.gadgets.co.uk/space_pr.html) which is a home lighting thingy.

More professional stuff can be found at the cheaper end of the DJ Market, for example take a look at the stuff here (http://www.djstore.co.uk/cgi-bin/group.pl?group=lighting). Some good colour/movement type systems for under £100.

If you want be really flash, have a look at something like this (http://www.starceiling.co.uk/starframe.html)

Cheers

Ian

[Edited by IWatkins - 1/21/2003 11:05:11 PM]

Thanks for the links guys

I can see another busy morning at work coming on :D

"Colour Kinetics"

http://pro.colorkinetics.com/index.htm

Not sure if they're available dircet in this country. I think someone organised a bulk buy/import from the states.

Somebody's work in progress here (http://www.logics.co.uk/colorkinetics/iand.htm)

Deano