Adding skylights to any commercial building can help you reduce several overhead costs and create a welcoming space. From shopping malls, restaurants and corporate offices to schools and hospitals, skylights enhance buildings and benefit everyone who visits them. With the right roof framing, you can install skylights securely and protect your building’s structural integrity.
What Are Skylights?
Skylights are windows in a building’s ceiling that capture natural light for indoor spaces. They come with various sizing, finishing and glazing options, and they are durable enough to withstand intense weather. Skylights significantly enhance a commercial building’s appearance and efficiency while improving the well-being of the people who frequent it.
What Are The Benefits of Skylights in Commercial Buildings?
Simple additions can make an immense difference when you build a new structure or upgrade an existing building. Consider the following benefits of skylights to discover how they can enhance your commercial building:
1. Energy Efficiency and Decreased Environmental Impact
Skylights reduce energy consumption, making your commercial building more energy efficient. According to Energy Star, lighting makes up 17% of the energy that commercial buildings consume. Installing skylights in your new or existing building allows for more natural light, letting you maintain well-lit rooms with less electricity and reduce your building’s environmental impact.
2. Lower Utility Costs
Since optimizing your lighting can help you significantly reduce energy consumption, it also helps lower utility costs. The more you utilize skylights for indoor lighting, the less you must rely on electricity and spend on energy bills. While lighting may seem like a small factor, it can help you save significant amounts of money and reduce your monthly overhead costs.
During the winter, skylights can help minimize your heating bill. Sunlight naturally warms indoor spaces, increasing the temperature and helping maintain comfortable temperatures with less electricity. Insulating a skylight’s metal framing optimizes its thermal performance, helping your building trap more heat.
3. Additional Cost Savings
While electricity is the primary budget reduction you can make with skylights, they offer additional savings. Adding skylights reduces the number of lighting fixtures you need to install and the number of lightbulbs you must replace throughout the year. Having fewer light fixtures in your building can also help decrease electrical repair costs.
4. Aesthetic Appeal
Skylights add a modern touch to buildings, making them more visually appealing to employees, customers and clients. The natural light they let in adds to and complements a building’s beauty, and this visual appeal can delight your clients, customers, and employees. The softness of overheard lighting brings a different feeling to a space than harsh fluorescent or LED bulbs.
Whether you want to provide a pleasant shopping experience for customers, make your clients feel comfortable or create an aesthetically attractive meeting space, skylights are an excellent way to do so. They can transform dark and dull spaces into warm, welcoming ones.
5. Greater Well-Being
Sunlight helps the brain release serotonin and causes the body to produce vitamin D, which boosts happiness, physical activity, cognitive function and sleep quality. Adding a skylight to your building can help your employees regulate their sleep cycles, improve their mood and reduce stress so they arrive to work each day feeling refreshed and ready to achieve company goals.
Natural light exposure also reduces eye strain, prevents headaches and decreases drowsiness. Providing your employees with plenty of natural light can significantly boost morale and create an exceptional workspace. It can also help students perform better on tests if you’re planning to build a school, or it can help patients recover faster if you own a hospital.
6. Increased Productivity
Skylights can also help you and your employees increase productivity. Since natural light supports mental and physical wellness, it also increases consciousness and attention, leading to faster reaction times. Working in natural light can help you and your team focus and complete tasks in a timely manner, helping you meet productivity goals efficiently.
7. Increased Property Value
You can increase your property value by building a structure with a skylight or adding skylights to your existing building. Their aesthetic and functional value make your building more appealing to potential buyers if you decide to sell it in the future. The more valuable your building is, the higher the return on investment (ROI) you can earn.
8. Strength
Skylights feature incredible strength because they typically consist of the following materials:
- Laminated safety glass
- Cellular polycarbonate glazing (CPG)
- Fiber-reinforced plastic (FRP)
Manufacturers engineer skylights to withstand elements such as wind, snow, dead loads and highly impactful wind-borne debris. CPG-glazed skylights are incredibly impact-resistant and do not fracture or shatter when objects strike them. They are also lightweight enough to cause little to no damage if they dislodge from their frames during extreme weather. Laminated safety glass typically provides excellent transparency and light transmission for the clearest views. CPG and FRB skylights are the best options if you prefer translucency. Skylights with CPG or FRP prevent eye strain by minimizing glare.
Are Skylights Worth It?
Skylights are excellent additions to any building and are worth the investment. Their modern touch and soft natural light can attract more people to your space and boost employees’ moods, helping improve productivity and profits. Additionally, the money you can save on energy costs may significantly reduce overhead and increase your ROI.
Benefits of Adding Skylights in Your Commercial Building With QuickFrames
A high-quality commercial roof frame is essential for installing skylights safely, and you can add skylights to your building easily and efficiently with QuickFrames roof frames. At QuickFrames, we manufacture safe and cost-effective roof-framing structures for commercial construction. Our flexible and adjustable frames can fit your application within minutes, eliminating the need to design and detail roof openings, weld openings and perform frame rework.
With the right framing system, you can simplify the skylight installation process and rest assured that your skylights are secure. Our precision tooling and experienced production team enable us to meet quality standards to exceed your expectations, and installing skylights with QuickFrames roof frames helps maintain your commercial building’s structural integrity.
Explore QuickFrames’ Roof Framing Products and Services
Skylights can enhance your building’s appearance, reduce your energy consumption and improve the well-being of employees and patrons. Allowing warm natural light into your indoor spaces helps reduce stress, increase focus and lower your energy costs.
Installing your skylights with the right roof frame is essential, and QuickFrames offers dependable roof framing products to preserve your building’s structural integrity and ensure your skylights are secure. We design our products for easy installation, helping you save time and labor without compromising reliability. We are also committed to excellent customer service, so you can expect top-tier products and fast delivery. Explore QuickFrames products to support your skylights with expertly engineered structural roof frames.