Green Means
Comfortable Indoor Environments
By Shannon Scott
I mentioned
two weeks ago that indoor environmental quality (IEQ) encompasses indoor
conditions needed for human health and comfort.
I discussed two factors affecting indoor comfort: clean, fresh air, and
comfortable room temperatures. Now
let’s take a look at two more IEQ factors – lighting and views.
Lighting Design
Daylighting
helps create a visually stimulating and productive environment for building
occupants, while reducing as much as one-third of total building energy costs. Natural daylight makes interior spaces feel
better, illuminates more clearly, saves massive amounts of energy, and makes
people feel good. It is human nature to
want to connect with the outdoors, so placing windows where people can gaze out
and allow natural daylight in makes for a pleasant environment.
Lighting is
the largest energy use in most commercial buildings. Many work places have little natural light
entering windows so that artificial lights are on full force during mid-day
hours. Some houses suffer the same
natural light anemia, raising energy costs unnecessarily. Artificial lighting proves another barrier
between humans and the natural world, which makes for us not feeling well in
our daily environments.
When homes
and commercial buildings are designed to make use of natural daylight to
illuminate interior spaces without summer heat gain, blinding sun, or annoying
glare these interior spaces feel better and are more pleasant in which to live
and work. Lighting makes spaces feel
good or function poorly, and affects the overall sense of space. Darker rooms often feel smaller than brighter
ones. Rooms that are too bright prove
tense and feel industrialized.
Architectural Products Magazine noted
daylighting study results in schools and retail buildings:
·
Daylighting has proved to increase per
transaction value in retail store settings. Customers stay in the store
longer.
·
Full daylighting enabled students to get more
vitamin D than students in schools with primarily electric lighting.
These students’ had nine times less dental decay and grew nearly an inch more
in height over two years.
Sidwell Friends School lighting schematic
showing natural daylighting options
Windows,
sky lights, light shelves, and solar tubes are a few ways to bring beautiful
natural light indoors. For existing
buildings, adding traditional style, energy efficient sky lights and/or tubular
sky lights may be the cheapest and most effective addition for improving IEQ
lighting.
We all need
to use artificial lighting when natural light is dim or non-existent. Some artificial light choices are better than
others. There are books and free videos
available on line, put out by lighting manufacturers, the American Lighting
Association (http://www.americanlightingassoc.com/Lighting-Fundamentals/3-Types-of-Lighting.aspx)
and others explain the three main types of lighting: ambient, task, and
accent. Nicely lit homes use a
combination of all three.
Best
choices in artificial lighting are always low energy use fixtures, and long
lasting bulbs. Compact fluorescent lights (CFL), high density discharge (HID),
and light emitting diodes (LED) all emit more light with less electricity then
incandescent lighting. CFLs emit the
same light as incandescent using 70-80% less electricity. While these bulbs contain trace amounts of
mercury the mercury criticism is overblown.
CFLs, typically, have about as much mercury as eating a can of tuna
fish.
Lighting
controls also make a huge difference in energy conservation and human
comfort. Photosensors monitor daylight
and auto-adjust the amount of light needed.
These may work great if they can be manually adjusted as well. Timers are good in some situations,
especially commercial buildings, but need manual overrides so if people go into
work during off hours they can control the lighting. Occupancy sensors which have been common for
some time, can also tie into HVAC thermal controls to turn on or off heating or
cooling only when buildings or rooms are occupied. All of these lighting methods make people
feel better in their environments, increase productivity, and save energy use
and costs.
Views
An obvious
hand-in-hand benefit of natural daylighting is having views out windows. People feel better, whether at home or work,
if they can gaze out and see a tree, park, wild life, or somehow get a visual
connection with the natural world. Views
into brick walls, streets, asphalt, and other buildings do not make people feel
good and do nothing to contribute to work place productivity.
Young Children's Relationship with Nature: Its Importance
to Children's Development & the Earth's Future, by Randy White
documents studies showing that:
·
Children with views of and contact with nature
score higher on tests of concentration and self-discipline. The greener, the
better the scores (Faber Taylor et al. 2002, Wells 2000).
·
Exposure to natural environments improves
children's cognitive development by improving their awareness, reasoning and
observational skills (Pyle 2002).
·
Nature buffers the impact of life stress on
children and helps them deal with adversity. The greater the amount of nature
exposure, the greater the benefits (Wells 2003).
People
think better and perform tasks more efficiently when they feel good – so it’s
time to design homes, schools, and businesses – any building we inhabit - with
this in mind.
Shannon
will be offering a full day seminar in Green Home Design and Construction at
Great Basin College, November 10th.
These seminars help anyone planning to build a home understand the
importance and how-to of site selection, energy efficiency, floor plan
functionality, what makes a building feel good, and function cost effectively. Check with Community Education at the college
for details.
Shannon Scott
is a green home owner, designer, and builder.
She and her husband live in northwestern Nevada in a straw bale home they
designed and built without hired help.
She can be reached at: deepgreenresults@gmail.com
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