 |
Skylighting offers an opportunity to provide excellent lighting quality, high illumination levels, and substantial energy savings for your commercial clients. It can make for beautiful buildings, and has been shown to improve the performance of the people inside. Sponsored by the DesignLights™ Consortium (DLC) and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), the Heschong Mahone Group created the following skylighting tools to facilitate understanding of skylight design.
knowhow™ Guides
Design guides for retail and warehouse skylighting systems to optimize both lighting quality and whole building energy savings.
Case Studies
Examples of skylit buildings.
The Skylighting Guidelines
Documents providing specification choices for both skylights and electric lighting controls.
SkyCalc® Skylighting Software
A simple Excel macro that helps optimize the design of skylit buildings using local climate data.
 |
Adobe Acrobat Reader is needed to read these files. Download a free copy here. |
The two 8-page brochures listed below provide layouts for skylighting designs that integrate efficient electric lighting with daylighting. The Skylighting knowhow™ brochures inform the reader of lighting quality design issues and offer different lighting and skylighting layouts for warehouses and retail spaces.
The pdf files include the 8 pages of each brochure, plus at the end of the file, a combined version of pages 4 & 5 to allow you to view material that spans both pages at the center of the brochure.
Back to top
Four 2-page case studies of skylit buildings in the Northeast that successfully use skylighting to enhance occupants' performance and building aesthetics, and save energy at the same time. The case studies include the following building types: warehouse, big-box retail, grocery store and an industrial work environment.
Back to top
The Skylighting Guidelines is available from the Web site of Energy Design Resources. These guidelines:
- Describe opportunities for energy savings and good lighting design
- Explain how to integrate skylights with other building elements
- Show how to estimate energy and dollar savings
- Help designers avoid costly mistakes
Northeast Optimization Chapter:
This new chapter to be inserted in the Skylighting Guidelines is written to help architects and engineers use skylights to maximum advantage of daylighting quality and energy savings in commercial and industrial buildings in the Northeast. The chapter covers regional issues and guidance on how to design an optimum skylighting system in the Northeast. It addresses energy performance, illumination conditions, and specification issues with summary graphs that illustrate the comparative effect of different parameters and skylighting rules of thumb. The chapter also covers maintenance and security issues related to skylights.
- Northeast Optimization Chapter of the Skylighting Guidelines
- The Skylighting Guidelines is available from Energy Design Resources. Click the "Publications" tab to access and download this PDF document. Also included in The Skylighting Guidelines is the SkyCalc® User's Guide.
Back to top
SkyCalc® is a free, simple computer tool that helps building designers determine the optimum skylighting strategy that will achieve maximum lighting and HVAC energy savings for a building. This program is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet application that runs on a personal computer.
SkyCalc US runs on Microsoft Excel 7.0 for Windows 95 or a compatible version of Microsoft Excel. Installation requires a minimum of 2 MB of free disk space, but 10 MB of free space is recommended for running the program. SkyCalc US comes as a self-extracting zipped file. After you have downloaded these files to your hard drive you can double click on the file icon to un-zip the files. You can choose to include all 19 available weather files, or just a subset, per the chart below. Copy SkyCalcUS.xlt into your XLSTART folder. The XLSTART folder is usually in the Excel Templates folder in the MS Office folder. Make a new folder for the weather files in any convenient location. Start the program by opening Excel and asking for a new file, and choosing the SkyCalc option. Consult the Users Manual included in the Skylighting Guidelines for more detailed information on installation and operation. The SkyCalc User's Guide is available on the Energy Design Resources Web site. This document is part of the Skylighting Guidelines and is in Adobe Acrobat format. You will need the Acrobat Reader plug-in to view these files. An earlier version of SkyCalc for California and the Skylighting Guidelines are also included on a CD-ROM available from the Energy Design Resources website. Order the CD-ROM.
- To download these files, save them to your computer's hard drive while you are viewing them.
- You also can print these files when viewing them.
| Descriptions |
Zipped Size |
Unzipped Size |
SkyCalUS Spreadsheet
Needed for all options |
0.4 MB |
1.0 MB |
| Weather Files |
| SkyweaCA - 16 California Climates |
2.2 MB |
8.5 MB |
SkyweaNE - New England climates:
Albany, Boston, Burlington, Buffalo, Concord, Hartford, New York |
1.0 MB |
3.7 MB |
SkyweaNW - Northwest Climates:
Boise, Medford and Seattle |
0.4 MB |
1.6 MB |
SkyweaOtherUS - Other US climates:
Albuquerque, NM; Boulder, CO; Daytona, FL; Fort Worth, TX; Honolulu, HI; Madison, WI; Nashville, TN, Raleigh, NC |
1.1 MB |
4.3 MB |
Back to top
|
|