Bright Daylight in; Minimum Heat out
With a Solatube sun pipe you can enjoy naturally lit rooms and a pleasant indoor temperature all year round. Solatube sun pipe daylight systems can deliver bright daylight to almost room under the sun but without sacrificing on heat loss or your homes’ thermal efficiency.
Are Solar tubes better than skylights?
Solatube® daylight systems are thermally efficient
Due to the excellent thermal efficiency of a Solatube tubular skylight, *U-value 1.3W/m2K (Equivalent to Double-glazing with Low-ecoating and Argon filled windows), minimum heat is lost during the winter, ensuring indoor temperatures remain pleasant and constant on colder days, whilst keeping your fuel bills to a minimum.
Importantly, a Solatube tubular skylight only requires a small diameter opening through the roof to deliver the same amount of light as a much larger Velux style roof window or sky light. This means there is a much smaller opportunity for heat to escape from your home. Combined with extremely good insulation they are the preferred sustainable choice for the provision of natural daylight.
Cut out harmful UV radiation – Do Solatubes provide heat?
In addition, Solatube tubular skylight systems incorporate UV (ultra violet light) filters to prevent the transmission of harmful UV radiation and heat from the sun, enabling you to maintain a pleasant indoor temperature, even during hot summer days. It is the UV element of daylight that not only creates heat build up (often called the green house effect - the excessive heat you get in a conservatory whenever the sun shines), but also causes the colours in fabrics and paintings to fade. So, a Solatube tubular skylight is an excellent way of lighting up dark rooms and areas in your home without risking damage caused by fading to your favourite works of art or your cherished furniture, and carpets or rugs. Furthermore, whilst also keeping the heat in during the winter, they also prevent excessive heat build up that you experience with roof lights, Velux style windows and skylights on sunny days.
Solatube® systems can be installed into any type of roof
Solatube daylight systems can be installed into any type of roof construction, be it a thatched roof, tiled roof, slate roof, flat roof, composite panel roof (such as Falk or Kingspan) or even a green roof; Solatube has the perfect roof flashing option for every scenario. Solatubes discrete daylight harvesting domes can be positioned almost anywhere on the roof and the daylight can be piped down highly reflective tubing into the desired space within the building. No matter how big or small the space under your roof is Solatube brings daylight indoors.
Solatube tubular skylights take up very little space
The roof dome that captures the daylight is a relatively small diameter and consequently they take up very little space on the roof. Therefore, with Solatube tubular skylight systems you’ll have more space on your roof to fit solar PV electric panels and/or solar thermal water heating for an even more sustainable home. Also, Solatube sun pipe systems are extremely low/no maintenance, which is important when the domes are positioned in difficult to reach places.
Low profile roof collector
A low profile roof daylight collector is also available for pitched roof applications. The low profile collector harvests daylight and bounces the daylight down through a 99.7% reflective tube system into the desired space below. And whilst a dome will always deliver more light, the low profile, of flat collector is ideal for historic buildings and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), or applications where the aesthetic look of the roof is to be retained, as the collector is much less visible than the standard roof dome.
For more information and pricing, email info@solatubescotland.co.uk or call us on 07778 283427.
*TNO Built Environment and Geo sciences.
Report number: 034-DTM-2010-02535-S- Determination of LT, g-value and U-value of Solatube daylighting systems. https://www.solatubescotland.co.uk/documents/TNO%20Summary%20Solatube%20160%20and%20290%20DS%20U-value%20LTA%20and%20g-value.pdf