Natural light is a powerful tool when integrated properly into your design. It can reduce lighting loads (the cost to power lighting elements) and cooling loads (the cost to power cooling systems), earn LEED credits, and provide a relaxed and beautiful space for occupants.
Though there are substantial advantages from integrating natural light into your design, there are challenges to harnessing its power. Solar heat gain and glare can impact your project, and there is typically a trade-off between daylighting and insulation values.
At EXTECH, we remove the doubt and help optimize daylighting for your structure through Daylighting Analysis, a simulation that places your design in a virtual setting and predicts the levels of daylight inside during different times of the day, during different seasons. Some of the factors taken into account are:
- Geographical location
- Sunlight hours
- Sky condition
- Shadow strength
- Aperture size
- Window-to-floor ratio
- Skylight-to-floor ratio
- Weather data
When your design is visualized in our computer simulation by our team of engineers, it enables you to make changes on the spot to optimize its daylighting capabilities. We walk you through the different scenarios and demonstrate how alterations in design can greatly increase the benefits that daylighting provides.