Daylight management

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Singapore, 29^th July 2014

Back at work today after a long weekend, which saw the Muslim community celebrate the end of Ramadan (Eid Al Fitr) yesterday, we had workers come into our office to fit special films on our windows specially selected to manage heat and light intake into our office. With large window bays at the street side the amount of daylight is quite extensive, but with that to no surprise I guess also the amount of heat from the burning tropical sun. When we moved into our office we had blinds fitted to the windows with the aim to manage the direct sunlight and outside brightness. However we under estimated the impact of heat, specifically for those sitting closer to the windows.

The blinds work very well in managing the outside brightness, or direct sunshine, balancing the amount of light from outside with the artificial light inside, but it did not manage the heat to well. So we decided to apply heat reduction filters to the window (according to the specs taking out 60-80% of the IR, but only 10-20% of the UV lighting) to get a handle on this. As you know in the tropics the daylight can be quite “strong” (Singapore is practically located on the Equator) so even with the film applied with bright daylight, there is still plenty of light coming in. Ultimately we still want to maximise daylight and minimise artificial light during the day to be as sustainable as possible.

The great win today will be the reduction in air-conditioning need. we anticipate we will not need to run it at full throttle. I already switched off the A/C in my room today after the filters where applied. The fact that it was a rainy day helped as well I guess 🙂

The other great win was the reduction in glare/ brightness allowing us to have the blinds opened up more with a far better balance as result. All in all a good decision! Happy we decided to go ahead with it and what better way to learn how to manage and understand the impact of daylight then applying it to your self! Next step the installation of the lighting controls…coming to our office soon!

Light watch 5-124: The film being installed to the windows today