Have you seen the light? – The benefit of rooflight refurbishment

It’s a well understood fact that our current building stock is a cause of a vast amount of the emissions that are feeding climate change.

The main focus has been on a combination of improved thermal and energy efficiency and yet one important element of the building fabric, rooflights, have largely been overlooked. This is surprising as in many large industrial and logistics buildings they are the main source of natural daylight. Whilst current GRP rooflights can achieve service lives well in excess of 30 years, those installed in older buildings and those that either haven’t been maintained or have adverse environmental conditions, could be under performing in bringing light into the building. The consequence of this is that the building users will have to be more reliant on artificial lighting and as a result will both increase energy bills and CO2 emissions.

The solution is simple…

By replacing the rooflights with a modern GRP rooflights system the internal daylighting will be transformed, energy bills and emissions can be cut as artificial lighting is minimised. This is exactly what happened at a Distribution Centre in Warrington where the building and roof, which was over 25 years old, were comprehensively refurbished.

The picture below shows the dramatic contrast between the refurbished roof to the left and the yet to be refurbished rooflights on the right.

This project also utilised Hambleside Danelaws superior strength and low carbon Zenon Evolution GRP sheet. A product reinforced with a continuous filament woven glass mesh, significantly
exceeding the minimum requirements for non-fragility as part of the roof assembly.