January 6th, 2010
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
I’ll save the puns and bragging about what a bright idea it was to illuminate a dark interior room with a solar tube. I’ll just cut right to the details of how the process worked, for those who want to know.
Home office before solar tunnel; a dark spot
First, a couple guys, or one guy, (or it could be a woman, but the two companies we got bids from sent guys) poke around in the attic above the approximate place where the solar tube will have to travel to carry outside light through the attic and into your dim and dreary space below.
In our case, the installer we chose, a fellow named Juan who has been putting in solar tubes for more than a decade, immediately went to work advising us on the positioning of the tube and assuring us that the light would be sufficiently diffused. He saw that we would be limited by the placement of the furnace in the attic above. But he found a way to angle the tube past a beam and some duct work, so that we could have the light installed where we needed it.
Barbara Kessler
Andrew Winston
Danielle Nierenberg
Anthony Swift
