Daylighting Products

Daylighting lowers your building’s lighting expense for the life of your building. When the sun shines, your building’s light bulbs automatically dim or shut off. Wal-Mart is investing heavily in this technology.

Traditional daylighting with skylights has engineering issues.

• Every hole in your building’s ceiling might leak someday. Thick snow loads pressing down on each skylight can test both the skylight’s strength and the drainage around the skylight.

• Skylights can stop working after a snow.

• A skylight can especially leak if golf ball sized hail or wind-driven debris breaks the skylight glass. Plastic skylight covers are an alternative, but many types of plastic can degrade over time, which creates maintenance issues. Plastic is often made of petroleum.

• In winter, skylights are holes in the building’s insulation that can lose heat to the outside at night. In the summer, skylights can lose air conditioning dollars to the outside.

A Klinkman Solar concentrated skylighting system, covered under our patent #8,408,199, helps to solve these problems.

Our sawtooth daylighting windows are vertical and are under eaves, so that our sun windows don’t leak for the life of the building and vertically falling hail doesn’t hit our daylighting windows. Thick snow loads don’t press on vertically mounted windows and tend not to cover such windows.

With concentrated sunlight, we pass more solar energy through smaller window spaces. Your store, office, kitchen or classroom can be brighter, sunnier, more beautiful. Our system can fit enough extra sunshine into light tubes to send it downstairs to daylight multiple floors of your building. As with our greenhouse, solar safety and wind gust spilling are engineered into our reflectors. Our reflectors reach above trees to get sunlight that skylights miss.

Our net heat gain in winter can be phenomenal because we fit more heat through less glass. In summer we reduce your net loss of air conditioning dollars compared to skylights. In summer you may want to use low-emissivity film or low-emissivity storm windows to reduce your building’s heat gain. At some point in spring you might want to minimize your energy bills by screening out infrared rays on half of your skylights. This strategy works well with our concentrated daylighting system but not well with traditional sky-facing windows. Finally, you may want to refocus sunlight back into space on any weekend days, holidays and extremely hot summer days when your building is officially closed down.

Our solar daylighting system is manually focusable with an indoor hand crank, similar to commercial awning hand cranks and greenhouse ventilation hand cranks. It automatically tracks the sun from roughly 8:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. in summer with only one easy refocus per week. Given a rare manual system breakdown, the system will continue to partially daylight your building until a repair person can service it. In winter it automatically tracks between 9:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m., but can track between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. with two refocuses per day. We can also adapt motor-driven greenhouse crank systems to follow your building’s sun all year.

Everyone knows that catastrophic climate change is coming, and no customer wants to lead with their own chin into that punch. New buildings that aren’t certified as energy efficient simply won’t sell in today’s market.

The world of investments has changed. The days of making a steady 5% on AAA bonds are gone for good, and ultralong-range investments that pay steadily are golden. With Klinkman Solar Design, going green is good economics and wonderful business publicity on top of that. How can you afford to not use Klinkman Solar Design’s concentrated daylighting system?