Daylight Harvesting
Green Solutions Consulting Services
“Integrated Systems Design Approach to Managing Your Roof Asset”
Daylighting, whether active or passive, is the practice of using natural light to illuminate building spaces.
Daylighting is the controlled admission of natural light into a space through windows and skylights to reduce or eliminate the need for electric lighting. Daylighting helps create a visually stimulating and productive environment for building occupants, while reducing as much as one-third of total building energy costs. Bottom-Line profits and ROI (Return on Investment) just to start.
Utilizing Daylighting techniques can reduce electric lighting costs up to 75 percent per year. The initial investment of installing Daylighting systems can be recovered by the energy savings over a 2-5 year period. This same retrofit may cut energy costs by as much as $.50 or more per square foot, significantly affecting the Net Operating Income (NOI) of a building or facility.
The value of daylighting is hard to dispute when you ask people what they like, and it’s true for nearly all environments, from the family room to the best office space. This should come as no surprise, since humans have lived in concert with the sky for thousands of years. Beyond our natural affinity for daylight, studies have proven that daylighting exerts a profound effect on a person’s mood. Scientists believe that the changing intensity and duration of sunlight can affect our internal biochemistry. The best example of this is seasonal affective disorder, a “seasonal pattern” of unipolar and bipolar mood disorders. Exposure to daylight is known to increase the production of Vitamin D. The high illumination levels associated with daylight have become recognized as a treatment for seasonal affective disorder.
On the other hand, there are things people don’t like about daylighting, and skylights in general. For instance, poorly designed skylights can be uncomfortable to be under. They’re sometimes hot, and the glare can be too intense. Choosing the right daylighting system for the application can eliminate all of these problems.
Daylight Harvesting utilizes available daylight to reduce the amount of electrical lighting used in a room. Using a combination of skylights and automatic control devices, electric lights are turned off when there is enough daylight (foot candles) to sufficiently light the facility and turned back on when the daylight levels are too low. Green Solutions Consulting Services daylight harvesting systems consist of several skylights strategically placed for maximum illumination benefit. Each skylight is fitted with a prismatic dome outside of the building and a prismatic lens inside the building which “spreads out” the light. This prismatic lens softens the light and virtually eliminates heat transference and “hot spots” inside.
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