Utilizing More Daylight in Your Home Using Windows

If you’re looking to decrease your home’s monthly energy bill throughout the season, you’re probably thinking about using your air conditioning system less and opening your windows more. While this allows more natural ventilation through your home in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, you can’t rely on this alone if you want to see a noticeable decrease in your energy bill. There are other effective ways to save energy using your custom windows, and that’s by harnessing the power of natural daylight.

Daylighting makes use of natural light coming from your window, skylight or patio door instead of flipping a light switch. By relying less on electricity and artificial lighting throughout the day, you save more on energy consumption. Your home can become more energy-efficient, and it starts with using your windows to maximize daylight distribution. 

Implementing natural light into your home is easier said than done. But with the right planning and expertise with a trusted contractor in custom windows, you can ensure adequate daylight distribution in your home. It can also do wonders for you and your family, such as improving your mood, health and especially comfort. Our experts at Renewal by Andersen® of Knoxville share their insight.

What is Daylighting?

Daylighting is the use of natural light in a home or building. It’s the controlled admission of direct sunlight, diffuse-skylight, and other forms of natural light into an enclosed space to reduce the dependency on artificial lighting. It helps in visually stimulating a productive environment for its inhabitants as it provides a direct link to the dynamic and natural illumination provided by the outdoors.

When it comes to adding daylighting features in your home, it’s important to work with a professional in custom sliding windows and patio doors who can ensure a successful fenestration. While it can also be as simple as adding more windows or rearranging furniture, you still need a professional to consider other factors of your home that will affect its lighting design criteria. This includes the structure, where it’s built, and the local weather/climate patterns in Oak Ridge, TN. This is to help them design a daylighting system while carefully balancing glare control, heat gain and loss and even variations of daylight availability.

Why You Should Add More Daylighting Features

Most homes use around 10 percent of their overall energy usage on lighting. With more natural light, you won’t need to use artificial lighting for your interiors during the day, which makes a big difference in your monthly energy bills while improving the mental health and well-being of you and your family. Daylighting has even been proven to help improve productivity as well as absorb vitamin D into your body through natural sunlight!

What You Need to Consider

Adding more windows to your home is not impossible, but you need to consider your home’s current structure and design. You can consult with your trusted installer for custom bay windows about how you can maximize daylight distribution without affecting your home’s structural integrity. 

Choosing to get more natural light into your home is a great way to save electricity, but without proper planning and design, you’ll bring in unnecessary solar heat gain and glare with it. This will cost you more in energy bills in the long run as it forces your HVAC system to work harder to keep your home cool because of the increased heat from natural light. 

There are other things to consider when adding daylighting features to your home, such as:

• Checking Your Window’s Envelope Features – When you get too much glare from direct sunlight, it becomes difficult to watch TV or read your computer screen. Naturally, you’d close the blinds of your windows for more visual comfort. But doing this also means missing out on the daylighting benefits.

To reduce the amount of glare without sacrificing daylight distribution, we suggest adding more or take advantage of your window’s existing envelope structures such as splayed/deep reveals and exterior fins. These structures should be around nine to 12 inches (or 23 to 30 centimeters) deep and at an angle of 60 degrees to your windowpane to maximize their effectiveness.

• Determining the Purpose Of Each Room – Your needs and preferences will be different for each area of your home, which means you’ll want some rooms to have more daylight than others. For instance, if you want your bedroom windows to give you just enough sunlight in the morning, then you may opt to install picture windows on the east side of your room.

Other areas will need more natural light throughout the day for more visibility. Skylights are widely popular for bringing in more daylight to areas that usually don’t have any windows such as enclosed spaces and hallways. Your kitchen or laundry room can also benefit well from sliding windows as they’re easy to operate for more ventilation. You might even consider getting one for your home office to improve your productivity while at work. 

• Assessing Your Home’s Surroundings – It helps to know where you’ll add more windows by walking around your home in Oak Ridge, TN. You may also want to take note of the view of the landscape and the direction of the sunlight on each side of your home. This is to ensure your replacement windows will not only add more natural light to your home but will also face beautiful views of the outdoors.

• Remodeling Your Interiors – If adding more windows isn’t an option, you can always try remodeling your home’s interiors to accommodate more natural light. It can be as inexpensive as rearranging your furniture to benefit natural light or painting your interiors to lighter colors to enhance the reflection of natural light in a room. 

Working with a window contractor can also help improve your home’s daylighting distribution. They’ll come up with a design plan while making sure that your interiors are more open to allowing more daylight without any obstructions. And as a reputable contractor for custom bay windows in the area, you can count on the services offered by Renewal by Andersen of Knoxville to get the job done! Call us at (866) 609-5033 or you can visit our website. We serve our customers in Tennessee, including Oak Ridge and the surrounding TN areas!