Your Guide To Green

Let the Sun Shine!
Looking for a way to bring natural daylight into your home, basement, or office?

Tubular Skylights provide a highly versatile and easy-to-install means of coaxing the sunlight indoors -- and the added warmth can reduce heating bills in winter. The method is called "daylighting." It allows beautiful, natural light into spaced that have low light, are windowless, or are below ground.

Tubular skylights are mirrored "stovepipes" capped with a clear plastic dome that admits sunlight. A special lens on the bottom diffuses the light into a room through a ceiling fixture that looks like a regular light fixture.

Tubular Skylight Options

Simple Tubular Skylights

Most simple tubular skylights consist of an exterior transparent dome, a reflecting metal pipe that is either rigid or flexible, and a diffuser for installation at the ceiling level of the space. Flexible metal pipes are easier to install, but lead to more light loss from increased reflection and scattering inside the pipe.

Sun Trackers

Some systems contain a movable mirror or refracting system that is used to align incoming sunlight with the axis of the light pipe, minimizing reflection losses. A light pipe with this feature is called a "sun tracker." Sun trackers are available commercially and, once mass- produced, will be relatively inexpensive for home use. However, they lose effectiveness if the sky does not remain clear. The system is designed to collect light from the sun, which is a point source. Cloudy or overcast days result in an obscured sun, no point source, and reduced efficiency. In addition, sun trackers require occasional maintenance.

The Fiber Optic Future

Tubular skylights can avoid light loss by employing the fiber optics principle of "total internal reflection." Tubular skylights of this nature are made of a solid, transparent material, such as glass or plastic and can be quite long, with any number of bends. To make them economical, the pipe diameter is kept small. This eases installation but is more technically complicated at each end of the light pipe.

This technology is presently used in the special-effects industry with high-intensity electric lamps as the light source. Tubular skylights using fiber optic technology are currently too expensive for home and office applications.

Find Out More:

Visit Solatube and Oikos Green Building Source for further information, including more photographs, illustrations, and purchasing options.