Does anyone have any experience with these sun tunnels? My particular concern is do they bring a lot of heat into the house?

Very nice design. But only for daylight. At night, of course, these chandeliers don't light up.

How much $$ though?

I. LOVE. THIS!

What would make this perfect is if the inner walls of the tunnel had LED lights embedded so you could power it at night. And if I could figure out a path for the tunnel from my middle floor interior bathroom! (It's kind of wrapped with a staircase and there's no way to get natural light to it.)

What I would be careful about is fading from UV, if these tunnels ate what I think they are. And you'd need a bunch of these if your space is any size 69W isn't much.

kbizzle, we have a solar tunnel in our kitchen and I don't feel any heat from it at all. It's a nice thing to have and adds some extra light in the kitchen, but I don't know that I'd pay to put one in (ours was put in by the previous owner). I think it's meant to replace a window in the kitchen, but it really functions more like an overhead light fixture than a window, since you don't get the view or sense of openness that you get with a window.

I'm not sure that a few of those actually provide enough light for the big, lush, sun-loving plants in the first picture. Lovely to have the extra light, though, especially in darker homes. I hate having to turn lights on during the day.

all -- I've actually installed the standard sun tunnels in a ton of projects and they're great. They are meant more as a light source rather than a view, when skylights can't be installed. They provide a ton of light (you could easily mistake one for an electric light fixture) and you can actually fit them with both a light kit for night use (a fluorescent ring bulb inside the diffuser) and an exhaust fan. I can't remember the specific costs for material and installation, but I don't think it's any more than window, if not less.

My parents have some of these and while they DO provide a decent amount of light, it DOES tend to look like a bright beam of light shining down. Sometimes we like to stand in the beam on a sunny day and pretend we're Jesus in one of those Renaissance-style paintings. It's THAT intense. But it doesn't seem to make extra heat in the room. They've also had theirs for years and haven't had any issues with UV fading. I like the idea of these "chandeliers" to diffuse the light--would be nice if they could make one that didn't hang so low and so obvious though.

I stumbled across this article by mistake however I have seen one of these velux sun tunnels in the flesh at a design conference in London a few months ago.

The most impressive thing I noticed about them is they have this facility called 'shadow lighting' which uses small detectors that detetcd the movement and switch lights on/off authomatically depending where you are in the building.

It really does stand-out against other similar products on the market however can only imagine how much a full setup would cost!!!

Cheers

John
Velux Blinds