Benefits of daylight in the home
Natural light can not only reduce your electric bill, it can also brighten your mood.
Looking for a way to light up dark rooms and also cut down on energy costs throughout your home? What if you could perk up your home's interior and create a relaxing, yet stimulating environment in the process? Introducing natural light throughout your home is the easiest way to have it all. Read more about the benefits of natural light in your home below.
Natural Light in the Home
Maybe you’ve been inspired by the bright rooms you’ve seen online lately. Or perhaps you’re looking for a way to lower your stress level, while increasing productivity. Or maybe you’re looking to save on your electricity bills. Regardless of the reason, adding more natural light in your home can certainly prove beneficial and doesn’t need to cost the earth to achieve it.
Solatube tubular skylights are a simple, yet highly effective way of piping daylight in to dark rooms to significantly increase light levels in the home. If you’re not sure what a Solatube is (also known as light pipes or tubular skylights), you’ll be pleased to know they are a fantastically simple idea.
A clear dome on the roof gathers ambient daylight from outside and directs it down a highly reflective rigid tube, to the ceiling of the dark room below, flooding it with bright daylight. And whilst it may be difficult to comprehend just how much light a Solatube tubular skylight creates, just take a look at some of these short before and after videos video-gallery to get a better idea.
Here are some benefits of natural light in your home to consider:
1. Daylight from a Solatube tubular skylight helps you save on energy costs
Operating the lights in your home probably accounts for about 11 percent of your total energy consumption. Imagine the difference you can make if you simply turn off your lights in the daytime and take advantage of the added benefits that come from natural light.
2. Daylight helps you beat the blues
Ever notice the bounce in your step when the sun decides to peek out from behind the clouds after it has been particularly cloudy and dreary for a while? That’s because the sun creates vitamin D. A lack of vitamin D in your body may be one of the factors that contributes to depression, so absorption of the sun’s vitamin D has been linked to an improved mood and mental health.
3. Daylight has been shown to make you more productive
When your mood improves, so does your energy level. More energy = better concentration = more productivity. It’s that simple. If you can pipe daylight inside in to dark rooms using a Solatube tubular skylight to raise and increase light levels then you can enjoy significant improvements and benefits in your mental state.
4. Daylight keeps your body’s natural clock on schedule
Large amounts of artificial light tend to confuse your brain when it comes to wake and sleep times. Natural light, on the other hand, helps your body’s circadian rhythm and allows you to feel sleepy and alert at the appropriate times.
So, how else can you increase natural light levels in your home? Well, there are a number of ways to add more natural light in to dark rooms:
Consider installing more windows.
Whether it’s bay windows, bow windows or a “wall of windows,” the more there are, the more the light will shine through. For a more subtle impact, consider installing skylights, Velux style roof windows or clerestories. However, when these options are not possible or cost effective this is where Solatube tubular skylights, or tubular daylighting devices, come in to their own.
However, it’s worth being aware that trying to install la Velux style roof window with a light well beneath it to allow the light down to the room below is NOT always a good idea. Quite simply, a plasterboard light well is an incredibly inefficient way of introducing light inside, whereas a Solatube tubular skylight is designed to specifically to deliver light down to the ceiling of the room below.
It’s not rocket science, the rigid tubes of a Solatube tubular skylight are coated with the world’s most reflective material. Consequently they are able to reflect 99.7% of the light that enters at the top down to the room below. On the other hand a white painted light well can only achieve a fraction of that light delivery, plus it means creating a much larger hole in your celling, which also allows lots of heat loss. You can find out more about the pros and cons of roof lights versus tubular skylights here Solatube or Skylight
Incorporate brighter paint colours around your sources of natural light.
Allow the natural light to “play” throughout your rooms by brightening the house with white or light paint colours. A really good idea is to use a ‘light reflective’ paint such as Dulux Light and Space; its patented LumiTec formulation works with light-reflective particles to reflect up to twice as much light back into your room, when compared to their conventional emulsion paints
To get more impact, consider painting the window reveals white, as well as choosing lighter shades and colours for your interior furniture and furnishings, and that particularly includes your kitchen.
As you can see, introducing natural light throughout your home has many perks and a Solatube tubular skylight is a simple and highly effective way of achieving this. Most Solatube installations take around half a day to complete and cause very little mess or interference. Plus there’s no ‘make-good’ or redecorating needed afterwards.
Throughout the whole of Scotland, Solatube Scotland is the recognised distributor and installer of Solatube tubular skylights, or sun pipes.
If you are interested in bringing natural light into your home, why not contact us at info@solatubescotland.co.uk; 07778 283 427 to find out whether a Solatube sun pipe can help you. Typically, a fully installed system might cost anywhere between £900 – £1,200; that’s supplied, professionally installed and includes the VAT.
We service these postal codes and surrounding areas: AB,DD, DG, EH, FK, G, HS, IV, KA, KW, KY, ML, PA, PH, TD, ZE
We service all towns and cities in Scotland, including the surrounding areas: Aberdeen, Ayr, Aviemore, Cumbernauld, Dumfries, Dundee, Dunbar, Edinburgh, Elgin, Eyemouth, Falkirk, Fort William, Galashiels, Glasgow, Greenock, Inverness, Irvine, Kilmarnock, Kirkcaldy, Lanark, Livingston, Moffat, North Berwick, Oban, Paisley, Peebles, Perth, Peterhead, Selkirk, St. Andrews, Stirling