What are the benefits of natural light in your home?

Are you looking for a way to light up dark rooms and also cut down on energy costs throughout your home? What if you could perk up your home’s interior and create a relaxing, yet stimulating environment in the process? Introducing natural light throughout your home is the easiest way to have it all. Read more about the benefits of natural light in your home below.

Natural Light in the Home

Maybe you’ve been inspired by the bright rooms you’ve seen online lately. Or perhaps you’re looking for a way to lower your stress level, while increasing productivity. Or maybe you’re looking to save on your electricity bills. Regardless of the reason, adding more natural light in your home can certainly prove beneficial and doesn’t need to cost the earth to achieve it.

Solatube sun tunnels are a simple, yet highly effective way of piping daylight in to dark rooms to significantly increase light levels in the home. If you’re not sure what a Sun tunnel is (also known as light pipes or tubular skylights), you’ll be pleased to know they are a fantastically simple idea.

A clear dome on the roof gathers ambient daylight from outside and directs it down a highly reflective rigid tube, to the ceiling of the dark room below, flooding it with bright daylight. And whilst it may be difficult to comprehend just how much light a Solatube sun tunnel creates, just take a look at some of these short before and after videos to get a better idea.

Here are some benefits of natural light in your home to consider:

1. Daylight from a Solatube sun tunnel helps you save on energy costs

Operating the lights in your home probably accounts for about 15% of your total energy consumption, according to the Energy Saving Trust. Imagine the difference you can make if you simply turn off your lights in the daytime and take advantage of the added benefits that come from natural light.

2. Daylight helps you beat the blues

Ever notice the bounce in your step when the sun decides to peek out from behind the clouds after it has been particularly cloudy and dreary for a while? That’s because the sun creates vitamin D. A lack of vitamin D in your body may be one of the factors that contributes to depression, so absorption of the sun’s vitamin D has been linked to an improved mood and mental health.

3. Daylight has been shown to make you more productive

When your mood improves, so does your energy level. More energy = better concentration = more productivity. It’s that simple. If you can pipe daylight inside in to dark rooms using a Solatube sun tunnel to raise and increase light levels then you can enjoy significant improvements and benefits in your mental state.

4. Daylight keeps your body’s natural clock on schedule

Large amounts of artificial light tend to confuse your brain when it comes to wake and sleep times. Natural light, on the other hand, helps your body’s circadian rhythm and allows you to feel sleepy and alert at the appropriate times.

So, how else can you increase natural light levels in your home? Well, there are a number of ways to add more natural light in to dark rooms in addition to Solatube sun tunnels:

 

Consider installing more windows

Whether it’s bay windows, bow windows or a “wall of windows,” the more there are, the more the light will shine through. For a more subtle impact, consider installing skylights, Velux style roof windows or clerestories. However, when these options are not possible or cost effective this is where Solatube sun tunnels, or tubular daylighting devices, come in to their own.

It’s worth being aware that trying to install la Velux style roof window with a light well beneath it to allow the light down to the room below is NOT always a good idea. Quite simply, a plasterboard light well is an incredibly inefficient way of introducing light inside, whereas a Solatube sun tunnel is designed to specifically to deliver light down to the ceiling of the room below.

It’s not rocket science, the rigid tubes of a Solatube sun tunnel are coated with the world’s most reflective material. Consequently they are able to reflect 99.7% of the light that enters at the top down to the room below. On the other hand a white painted light well can only achieve a fraction of that light delivery, plus it means creating a much larger hole in your celling, which also allows lots of heat loss. You can find out more about the pros and cons of roof lights versus sun tunnels here.

Incorporate brighter paint colours around your sources of natural light.

Allow the natural light to “play” throughout your rooms by brightening the house with white or light paint colours. A really good idea is to use a ‘light reflective’ paint such as Dulux Light and Space ; its patented LumiTec formulation works with light-reflective particles to reflect up to twice as much light back into your room, when compared to their conventional emulsion paints.

To get more impact, consider painting ceilings and the window reveals white, as well as choosing lighter shades and colours for your interior furniture and furnishings, and that particularly includes your kitchen.

As you can see, introducing natural light throughout your home has many perks and a Solatube sun tunnel is a simple and highly effective way of achieving this. Most Solatube installations take around half a day to complete and cause very little mess or interference. Plus there’s no ‘make-good’ or redecorating needed afterwards.

Across the south and west, Solatube Southwest is the recognised distributor and installer of Solatube sun tunnels (or light pipes), from Bournemouth down to Plymouth and beyond.

If you are interested in bringing natural light into your home, why not contact us at Solatube Southwest; 07989 976 010) to find out whether a Solatube sun pipe can help you. Typically, a fully installed system might cost anywhere between £900 – £1,200; that’s supplied, professionally installed and includes the VAT.