LEED, or the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, has evolved from being a new green building standard unveiled by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) in the year 2000 to today’s comprehensive and organized system of multiple design standards. LEED scorecards exist for commercial buildings as well as homes, and they provides a useful list of ratings that show how energy efficient a particular construction process and product is.
Sustainable Lighting Blog
Keep up with the latest news about daylighting and sustainable design.
Convincing Your Client to Invest in Natural Lighting
Every architect has performed the delicate dance required to convince clients to include certain design features, materials, or mechanical systems into their facility. In many cases, you have to balance the desired project goals with budget limitations. You might also encounter resistance to ideas that seem unconventional to clients who are not active in the design world.
How Can Industrial Skylights Improve Building Health
Certain elements of your building’s interior, such as internal temperature, light quality, and air quality, can markedly affect the health and productivity of the building occupants. Incorporating industrial skylight into your facility greatly improves the building health in a few key ways.
8 Important Questions to Ask About Daylighting Systems
When evaluating multiple daylighting systems, it is helpful to make comparisons between the same sets of information given for each daylighting system so you can objectively decide which one is right for your building. Of course you want to know the cost, but like most major purchasing decisions, this is not the only factor to consider. Quality, performance, and long-term savings are also important.
How to Cut your Building's Electrical Costs with Daylighting
In 2014, 19% of all the electricity consumed by the commercial sector was used for lighting alone. The lighting systems that a facility uses can have a drastic effect on its operating costs, and when you consider that the price of electricity has been steadily rising, increasing by 63% since 2003, this can have a dramatic effect on overhead costs. Replacing electric light fixtures with well-integrated natural lighting is one of the surest ways to reduce electricity use.
Should You Put Solar Tracking Skylights in Your Building Design?
Staying ahead of rising electricity costs is a struggle faced by all business owners and building managers. Last year the average electricity cost across the U.S. rose by 3.2 percent, and has shown no signs of declining. This is forcing architects and business owners to adapt by incorporating the latest sustainable technology into new facilities.
Can Biophilic Building Design Save Your Business Money
While designing a building based upon healthy, biophilic building design principles fosters better employee health and workplace satisfaction, many people do not realize it can also save companies quite a bit of money.
4 Advantages of Natural Light in Commercial Settings
Supermarkets were once discouraged from incorporating natural lighting into their design plans, because it was believed that sunlight would increase cooling loads and spoil fresh food products quickly. According to new research, however, properly diffused daylighting products avoid these negative consequences and in fact provide multiple benefits for supermarkets. Architects and designers are now rethinking the best way to illuminate a supermarket interior.
5 Key Factors When Considering Integrating Daylighting
Integrating daylighting into a facility, particularly as part of a retrofit project can be extremely challenging. A poorly system will have trouble providing the greatest potential benefits of daylight. Below are five important factors to consider for your project.
4 Key Ways Solar Tracking Skylights Improve on Traditional Design
In the last few decades, skylight technology has undergone a vast revolution. The industry has transitioned from traditional, passive skylight design to more efficient active designs—such as solar tracking skylights.