Skylights and rooflights are excellent options for homeowners and business owners to introduce more natural lighting into the home. The value of this can’t be understated, as natural light is shown in various scientific studies to contribute to improve mood and contribute to better working and living conditions, as well as lead to the synthesis of vitamin D, which is important to human health. Additionally, skylights and rooflights can be a great architectural design choice, improving the look and feel of a building. There are various types of rooflights that differ in terms of their size and the materials they were made with, and one of the ways that they differ is if they can be opened or not.
A skylight that can open up doubles up as a source of ventilation for your home. This can be a great way to help keep the air temperature low during the summer months, but it can also be used in a kitchen to help to keep steam or smoke from building up in your home. Some product options include a polycarbonate skin that will prevent water from infiltrating the inside through the opening while still allowing the steam or smoke to escape. With skylight variants, it is usually difficult to find sun tubes that are able to be opened up, however you can find them quite readily when looking at flat skylights. You can also get larger roof lanterns that having openable sections, so both are good options for increasing the ventilation in your indoor space.
Openable skylights are also beneficial for other purposes too, namely, as a potential access hatch. It is not uncommon for modern builds to build in an access hatch to a flat roof section, so that maintenance of the roof and any other apparatus in the space can be maintained. If you’re going to have a section of roofing that is designed to work as an access hatch, the thinking is that you may as well use it as a skylight as well, thereby getting an additional benefit of an increase in natural lighting. These products will typically come with various other components, such as a hand rail or a small ladder that you will have installed alongside it.
The way openable skylights is as you probably imagine; with hinges. The complexity of the mechanisms involved are twofold. Firstly, opening a window and opening a skylight are different processes because opening a normal window doesn’t require that you actually lift the entire window, whereas that is the reality with an openable skylight. Secondly, an openable skylight is great, but because of their placement in the roof they are often unreachable by hand. As a result of this fact, most of these products are sold as electric skylights, in that they are mechanically operated through electrical switches that can be placed in arms reach. An electric skylight is a fundamental requirement when you want a rooflight that can offer high quality insulation but will also open up when required.