That’s all I want to ask. It’s 2024, people. Shouldn’t all of our buildings have more skylights and windows at this point? Why am I still seeing buildings that have lights running during the day? Why are buildings still being built in ways where we need to rely on artificial light when the sun is shining?!? So much money and electricity could be saved.
Cause buildings like that are called greenhouses. They become hot as fuck in summer and cold as fuck in winter.
With dual pane and adequate cooling/heating systems it shouldn’t be that bad. It doesn’t take a huge window to let in light.
Luckily heating and cooling cost no energy! 👍
Because more windows would probably use more energy than having a more insulated building with lights.
Dual pane windows?
Depending on the area you might want to have triple pane windows instead, otherwise there is too much heat lost during winter. Double or triple pane windows don’t protect from the sun’s heat thought, so you would need additional shielding/dimming from that, which in turn will make it darker in your building. Hence I guess it’ll only work for buildings with lots of window space compared to the floor space, i.e., single family homes or other small buildings.
Not to mention cloudy days, or short days in winter, so the building would have to be fully wired for lights anyway. And dimmable for when they only need to supplement a cloudy day.
Natural light is one of those things that seem super obvious, until you spend pretty much any time actually thinking about it.
It’s not a thing because it doesn’t make sense to be a thing, not because no one thought of it.
Sunlight is proportional to the square of a building’s radius, but the light demand is proportional to the cube. This is assuming a relatively simple building design, of course, but that’s the basic answer. Just a matter of how the dimensionality scales as the building gets bigger.
My guess would be costs. Skylights need to be framed and installed in a way that prevents leaks for as long as possible. They need to be well insulated, so that light is maximized and heat transfer is minimized. More windows also means higher maintenance and replacement costs.
I love the idea of skylights! I have never owned a home with any though. Probably just like with everything else in a house: people seem to like it until it leaks.
For starters there’s more than one floor in my house, so the trade offs of punching holes in my roof are only beneficial to a small portion of the house.
The next is the overall costs. Windows that are sealed properly and insulate as well as a solid roof are fucking expensive as hell. This is a luxury feature when building a home and most of us are not making luxury money.
My last thought is control over the lighting. Again, its more costly to install motorized shading (because otherwise you need a long awkward pole or some other weird system) for when you don’t want a beam of light blinding you for various reasons. Glare on a tv is an obvious example. Maintenance on these systems is a pain in the ass compared to changing a light bulb, and these days you can just get LED lighting that lasts for years and never requires a bulb change for relatively cheap.
Actually another thought related to the shade controls is privacy. Depending on how tall neighboring buildings are you may not want the neighbors just peering in, so again you need shade controls. It’s situational, and not everyone is in a situation where this wouldn’t be a problem.
Edit: Another thought is cleaning. I’m not climbing up on the roof to clean those and it’ll look like shit after awhile if I don’t. If there’s surrounding trees dropping leaves this will be a more frequent issue
