Bright Ideas for Home Lighting
(Page 5 of 7)
April/May 2007
By Megan Phelps
Choose renewable energy. To further reduce your fossil fuel consumption, you can choose several different strategies. One option is to purchase your electricity from renewable sources (for more information, see “Vote with Your Dollars: Opt for Green Energy” (April/May 2007). Another is to install a home-scale wind turbine or solar panels to produce electricity for your home. Either way, you’ll also definitely want energy-efficient lights, because the less electricity it takes to power your home, the smaller the system you’ll need to purchase. (See “Easy DIY Solar Lighting,” April/May 2007, for more on lighting your home with solar energy.)
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You also can use solar power for smaller applications, including outdoor lights. Solar-powered security lights are widely available, and most cost only $50 to $100. Even less expensive are solar-powered garden accent lights. You can find a set for less than $50.
THE ALLURE OF NATURAL LIGHT
For the ultimate in efficient, natural and appealing lighting, you can’t beat daylight. Some studies have found that people who work in rooms with natural light are more productive.
To substitute for daylight, some people turn to full-spectrum lights, which are designed to mimic the color spectrum of sunlight. However, many consider them a poor substitute. “A lot of people think they want full-spectrum, and then they put it in their homes and they don’t like the quality of the light — it’s a very bluish light; it feels very cool,” Wilson says. If you’re interested in full-spectrum lights as a treatment for seasonal affective disorder (SAD), be sure to consult a physician. Light therapy is more complicated than changing your overhead light bulbs, and this treatment is not appropriate for everyone.
Exposure to sunlight is important to our health, because it allows our skin to synthesize vitamin D, but it has to be direct sun — even sunlight through window glass doesn’t do the trick. However, bringing more sunlight into a building has other benefits.
If there’s enough sunlight to allow us to leave the electric lights off, it saves electricity. It also makes a building more comfortable. George Beeler, an architect with AIM Associates, works extensively with daylighting: strategies for bringing more natural light into buildings.
“Almost every client I have says they want a building to be light and airy. That’s what you get with daylighting,” he says. It’s also a simple way we can feel more in touch with the outdoors. “Daylight is in a sense alive, because we are aware of the fact that the weather is changing outside and what time of day it is,” he says.
Strategies for daylighting can be surprisingly complex. That’s because the goal is to let in natural light, but to prevent glare. In summer, you also want to keep out additional heat. Factors involved include your latitude, shading of the building and window height. But some strategies are easy to adopt at home.
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