I can see clearly now

The following is really MrBears's project but he seems to have gotten out of the blogging business. So I get to share the news.

Today we lit up the house. We had some Solatubes installed. They're basically skylights that bring the light into the house through a mirrored cylinder.

There were parts of the house that weren't lit very well. The hall, even with its light turned on, was rather bleak. That has all changed. Here are some pictures taken after the installer got finished. The whole project took only about four hours to install.

Mind you, these pictures were taken with only the light from the new Solatubes.

Here's the hall lit up all pretty and nice. The Solatube replaced the former, very inadequate light fixture. There is a light in the tube so that we can light up the hall at night.

The family room has a lot of lights in its ceiling. We had to turn them on in the middle of the day if we wanted to see on the side of the room away from the windows. We now can see without using electricity! We can even read in our red recliners without turning on lights.
We were planning to have a dimmer sort of thing inside the family room's Solatube. But that would have involved engaging an electrician to run a wire through the rafters, down a wall and to a new switch. The installer supposed that it was going to be unlikely that we'd find an electrician who is willing to do that work in a space that is very inconvenient to get to. So we scrapped that and the light will always come in when the sun is shining. We don't watch many movies in the daytime so it probably won't ever be a problem that the light is always there.

And Jerry is always thinking of others. It would never have occurred to me to add such a light to the garage where I do the laundry. He thought that I might like to be able to work in the laundry room without having to turn on the fluorescent lights. It will be great laundering in natural light. Saturday is the day I usually do laundry but I couldn't do it today since the ceiling was going to be torn up. I can hardly wait to do laundry tomorrow!

If you thought that all that was enough, you're not thinking as well as Jerry. The Solatube folks have a solar-powered attic fan. Our attic space gets hot. And that keeps the house hot through the night. The dormer vents we have probably help to cool things off up there but they're passive. We had two of these fans installed. One is over the family room and one is over the main part of the house. The two parts are pretty much separate spaces with just a tiny hole in the wall between them that electricians probably don't want to shimmy through to run a wire.

Here's a view of the project from the roof. The attic fan is the black thing near the weather station. The Solatubes' tops are the domes beyond the dormer vent. (The disintegrating ridge caps are shoddy materials used when we had the family room and garage added. We need to get our roofer to replace them.)

Here's a close-up of the Solatube collector.

And here's a close-up of the inside. This picture used the flash to show the ceiling and lens's frame. We got the OptiView diffusers. The light coming from them is sharper than the other diffuser and is somewhat prismatic. We get pretty rainbows on the walls.

Here's one of the attic fans.

All of these improvements aren't using any electricity from the grid. We're Green! (Now if only we had insulation in the walls...)