Substitute for a Natural Light Skylight

Why Natural Light

• Sunlight allows for the best color rendering by the human eye. Making choices in clothing or makeup is easier and more accurate in natural sunlight, which is also preferred by people who must make color choices for business or hobbies, such as painters and photographers. In addition, Sarah Gudeman at Morrissey Engineering states, “Natural light has been attributed to increased employee satisfaction and productivity, as well as reduced absenteeism and accidents in the workplace.”

Tubular Skylights

• Tubular skylights can bring natural light to rooms with no direct access to the outside of buildings. A light-collecting dome on the roof allows light into a tube that leads down to a diffuser fitted into the ceiling of the room to be lit. Because the tube is coated internally with reflective material, it can routed around a number of bends. The roof dome is typically constructed of an optical plastic or acrylic; this balances maximized light transference with resistance to the ultraviolet rays, which cause brittleness in cheaper materials. The dome’s parabolic shape allows sunlight into the tube almost all day, whereas traditional skylights on pitched roofs only give a few hours of optimum performance. The diffuser projects the sunlight into all the corners of the room.

Further Benefits

• Tubular skylights minimize heat transference. Traditional skylights allow the heat of the sun directly into the room being lit, which can cause hotspots and add to cooling costs. In cold seasons, a traditional skylight allows heat to escape, at a rate that adds “about $20 in energy costs per square foot of glass each year on a national average,” the Replacement Contractor Online website reports. A tubular skylight, with a dome on one end and a diffuser on the other, is effectively insulated.

Full Spectrum Light Bulbs

• Although “full spectrum” is not a precise technical definition of light emitted from a bulb, it is commonly used to describe electric light that mimics natural daylight. Sunlight consists of all the colors in light -- the “full spectrum” of radiant waves. Full-spectrum bulbs replicate that quality. They give off a bluish light rather than the harsh tones of both traditional incandescent and fluorescent lighting. They have similar color-rendering capabilities to daylight. In fact, full-spectrum bulbs mimic the color of the sky, not that of a direct beam of sunlight, but they are a more than adequate substitute for natural light in situations where no other choice is available.