When the sun is at its highest point, how much natural light fills your home? Does light seem to pour in from every window and flood your home with the warm, comforting touch of yellow-orange light—or do you find your home needing a boost from lamps and ceiling lights?
Electric lights are fine supplementary sources of light, but natural light is great for your health, mood, and electricity bills. A quick fix would be to open all your blinds, curtains, and uncover all your windows and doors, but that’s only temporary and reduces your privacy. A long-term fix that can maintain or even increase your privacy are solar tubes installed by skylight contractors.
Solar tubes funnel sunlight down from your roof to your ceiling
Like an extended window, a solar tube or sun tunnel is a tube of reflective sheet metal that reflects sunlight gathered from your roof to your home. From the outside, the exterior of the solar tube is a dome or a sleek low-profile lens. Inside, the other end of the solar tube appears to be an inset light fixture. Much like an electric light, you can’t look through it to see the opposite end of the solar tube, and people from the outside can’t look in.
The diameter range of solar tubes is 10 inches to 21 inches, with the smallest diameter providing the illumination of three 100-watt light bulbs. That’s enough to cover 200 square feet, making it the perfect choice for walk-in closets, bathrooms, and hallways. The largest solar tubes can illuminate large rooms and provide more light than your electric sources.
Solar tubes are perfect for dim rooms that need privacy
Two areas of your home that need the most privacy are your bathrooms and bedrooms, which means they often lack windows or sunlight. If these rooms are the dimmest in your home, they’re the best place to install solar tubes. You can significantly increase their allowance of sunlight by installing a single solar tube in each one.
For most bathrooms, a small diameter solar tube will provide all the light you need from morning to the early evening. Master bedrooms could use larger solar tubes, if you don’t mind being woken in the morning with the warm touch of sunlight. Ask any homeowner with solar tubes about the benefits, and they’ll likely mention the increased sunlight without sacrificing their privacy. Those who also have skylights might mention the sheer brilliance of the solar tubes, which captures more sunlight than any skylight or regular window.
Mares & Dow — Solar Tube and Skylight Contractors
Contact your local skylight contractors at Mares & Dow Construction and Skylights today to transform your home with new solar tubes or, if you’d rather have a view of the sky with your increased natural light, traditional skylights. We have over 40 years of installation and consulting experience.
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