Home renovation is a tedious process, and knowing which developments would significantly enhance your quality of life is a game-changer. Whether it’s to conserve energy or simply lighten up a space, skylights are one of the most talked-about renovation upgrades in the industry. In this episode, Katharine MacPhail has Laureyn Furtney, co-owner of Synergy Skylights, with her to explain the power of skylights in transforming your space. Laureyn sheds some light on today’s no-leak skylights and recalls how skylights have improved through the years. Learn more as Laureyn walks us through the process of mounting and installing a skylight and how it helps improve the quality of your air, home, and life.
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Skylights With Laureyn Furtney – Holiday Rerun
This is the second repost of a 2019 episode. The last episode was Lighting Design. This week is Skylights. It’s all about lights for the season of the year. I interviewed Laureyn Furtney of VELUX Skylights for this interview. I did learn a lot about skylights and I have had one ever since. I hope you enjoy it.
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You and I were talking about skylights and how they have a bad reputation. First of all, the biggest one is that they leak, which we’re going to talk about. “The rain is going to be too loud. The sun is going to wake me up. I’m not going to be home during the day, so what’s the point? The heat loss and the sun will fade my furniture.” Let’s talk about the leaking first.
I come across this topic. Sometimes it varies throughout the week but what I’ve figured out is this. The older generation who has maybe had 2, 3, 4 homes and have older skylights have a negative connotation. Some people are like, “I’ve had skylights for 30 years and they haven’t leaked.” I feel like the older generation has a little bit more experience with them.
Many years ago, there were a lot of manufacturers that did skylights. A lot of those manufacturers are not around anymore. Maybe it’s because their product wasn’t performing as they had wished it to be, but we’re pretty much the only manufacturer left in the skylight game. We are a worldwide company. We’re the largest manufacturer in the world and we make a good product.
Many years ago, we thought to ourselves, “We need to gain the trust back in skylights.” We completely remanufactured our skylight and gave it a different design. With some of the steps that we took, which we can go into if you’d like, we were able to coin the no-leak skylight. Meaning it does not matter who puts the skylight in. There’s not a bunch of complicated steps to confuse you as long as you nail it to the roof deck. As long as you use some ice and water shield and our flashing kit that we give you, you will have a ten-year no leak warranty.
What happens after ten years?
There’s not necessarily a labor warranty involved in it but we expect these to last 20 to 25 years. We have to draw the line somewhere as a manufacturer like what every company does. A lifetime warranty doesn’t necessarily mean a lifetime warranty. It does get prorated at some point. Things do wither and age, and skylights are no different. To piggyback on that, I also have a talk to the younger generation and they look at me sometimes like, “I’ve never heard of that skylights leak.”
They’ve gotten better in the last 10 or 20 years. Some of the problems that people are used to hearing have gone away with time with a better product and more reliability. That’s helpful but we still need to continue to build the category being the only national manufacturer left. We’re going to continue to hear those things for sure.
A lifetime warranty doesn’t necessarily mean a lifetime warranty. Things do age, and skylights are no different.
Some of my clients refuse to believe that they don’t leak. In that case, maybe I’ll have them give you a call.
The person you’re going to believe is the manufacturer itself. To a homeowner who maybe doesn’t have a lot of experience with skylight, I can explain exactly why and make them feel comfortable with some of the basics on why these don’t leak. To homeowners, it does not matter how water is coming into their house. If they see water, it’s leaking. A lot of the time, it wasn’t leaking. It was just condensation.
When we used to put these skylights on the roof before we came out with our different design of the no-leak skylight. What was happening was there was a gap behind our drywall. It was not insulated with any membrane, whether it be ice and water shield or any insulating membrane that we have now because it didn’t exist. What was happening was that air was escaping through that gap. It’s hitting the back of the flashing which is aluminum.
If you had some poor indoor air quality, which most of us do, we have a lot of humidity and a lot of things going on that we are not aware of because we can’t see it. That humidity was hitting the back of the flashing. It’s warm inside and cool outside. On aluminum, it immediately makes water and at a good amount of it enough that it will drip. It wasn’t necessarily leaking. To be honest, as a homeowner, I don’t know if I would care either. Immediately people are like, “It’s leaking,” even though it wasn’t. There were some issues there. With our new design, we’ve been able to combat that as well.
Personally, there are a lot of reasons to install skylights. Some people might say the rain would be too loud. For me, that would be something I would want. I love to hear the rain. That’s a matter of taste. At night, you can see the stars. That’s amazing.
There are reasons why we have had a lot of success selling skylights, and to give the audience an idea, we are growing year over year with skylights. More people are putting them in. Two things have never gone out of style when you’re looking to build a home or you’re looking to improve on your home. It’s daylighting and fresh air.
Skylights are the very best way to daylight a space. If you could think about it intuitively, our skylights are facing up towards the sun. By doing that, we don’t get reflected light. It’s not bouncing off of anything like most of our vertical windows receive light. It’s getting direct light right through the skylights, and we can talk about how maybe people would think that’s negative and admit it. What it does is provide more light not just to the perimeter of our room but to the core of our space.
Because of that, we bring in more light if we had the same size vertical window about two times as much light. You can reduce your glazing. By glazing I mean, glass on your building envelope. When you reduce glass, you can become a little bit more energy-efficient, and still achieve all that daylight coming in. Those are the reasons. We do sell fixed skylights, which means they do not open. In my opinion, you’re taking our product and you’re cutting the capability in half because our name is VELUX and Ve is Latin for ventilation and Lux is Latin for light.
If you don’t give a window the ability to open, you’re just getting the light, which is amazing. You can move an incredible amount of air through skylights. With the stack effect or the chimney effect, you have your cooler and lighter air coming through your vertical windows and doors. Hot air rises, which is a true statement but it’s pushed up by that cooler and heavier air. Now you’re creating some airflow in the room, which helps freshen up your space but can also cool down your space tremendously fast, given the climate outside.
Those are the reasons why people still put in skylights. I don’t hear too much that people don’t like the sound of the rain. If somebody were concerned about that, the glass that we use now is much better than we did many years ago. We use a major glass manufacturer that the same large vertical window companies use. The glass that we use is laminated over the tempered glass. It is much quieter than it was many years ago. You’ll definitely notice a difference there.
Talking about the amount of daylight, there are days where it is bright. You’re getting direct light and glare even through vertical windows. Maybe it hurts your eyes or you can’t see your computer screen. Through a vertical window, we would maybe shut our blinds. We have that same capability with skylights.
A lot of my end-users, being homeowners, maybe have skylights now. There weren’t blinds many years ago. Now we have integrated blinds right in the skylights. You might think, “It’s 20 feet off my floor. How do I shut that blind? It doesn’t seem very easy.” We have them all battery-powered and they’re being constantly charged by a solar panel on the outside. It’s a little tiny solar panel that’s keeping that battery charged. You can press a button and those blinds will come down or open. You can even schedule them to do so as well.
I have a skylight in my bedroom. For the first two years of my home, I did not have blinds and it didn’t bother me too much, but now that I have the blind, it’s amazing. I won’t go back. I have it scheduled to close every night at 7:00 PM and open up every morning at 6:30 AM. It’s nice. On the weekends, I do it a little bit later but you can have the control to do whatever works best for you.
I had no idea you could schedule shades.
Skylights are the very best way to daylight a space.
Because of that, you get some more energy efficiency benefits. Maybe a human doesn’t have the ability or won’t remember every night to shut their blind at 7:00 PM. In the winter, if we can shut that blind, any window treatment is going to increase the energy efficiency of the window, but we have specific blinds for skylights that can increase the U value or the energy efficiency by about 40%.
To be honest, if I had to shut my blinds every night at a certain time, I would not remember to do that. We’re living people and we have way more on our plate than that. The fact that it gets scheduled can ensure that consistently I’m increasing the energy efficiency, especially in the wintertime, by keeping all that heat in. Sometimes at 4:30 PM, it’s dark outside. I’m not getting the benefits of daylight, especially from this time of year. Why not increase the energy efficiency of that window and I’m not losing out on any light?
In the morning, it opens right up. The benefits of daylight have been studied for a very long time. We are mammals. We go to the light. We have all types of analogies like, “Go to the light. You’re the light of my life.” Daylight is important to us as human beings. Why do dogs and cats lay in a patch of the sun when it comes to our windows? We function better with a certain amount of light on the day-to-day. In the morning, when the blinds open, whether I want to get out of bed or not, it helps me wake up a little bit and it helps your circadian rhythms and keeps them on track. It’s nice that I can wake up like that versus a very noisy annoying alarm clock.
What about the snow in the wintertime? If there’s snow on the roof, does it cover the skylight and you have to wait until the snow melts off? Is there any way to clear it off automatically?
I live in Massachusetts as well. Sometimes we’ll get a few feet of snow. It might stay up on my skylight for 1 or 2 days and that’s the heaviest snowstorm. The skylight is going to melt the fastest because of the insulating value. It’s not as great from glass versus your roofing and your insulation, and things like that. It will come quicker off of the skylight. We sometimes get standing issues or problems if it’s close to the edge of your roof but we’ve gotten much better with how we adhere that to the roof deck that we see those problems less and less.
You had mentioned that you have fixed skylights. I know that you have the solar skylight that you mentioned. What types of skylights are there available for people?
We have three main types of skylights. The most economical type of skylight is your fixed skylight. It’s going to bring in light. It doesn’t have the ability to open up, and then your next setup from there would be what we call a manual fresh air skylight. It’s how it sounds. You can manually open it. If it’s in reach, you’ll be able to crank it open with a handle.
Most of our skylights or over 90% of them are out of reach, especially in the United States. In that case, it would have a little eye hook on the end of it. You would have a pole that you would hook up and crank it open. That’s traditionally what people are used to understanding how skylights open. We have electric skylights and also solar-powered skylights.
If you want any type of mechanical skylight, that’s what you’d be doing. The electricity is going to be hard-wired in through your ceiling. We still offer those but we sell less of those because we have our solar-powered skylight, which is battery-powered. It’s being charged from a small solar panel on the outside of our skylight. That’s adhered right to our skylight itself and it’s keeping that battery constantly charged.
Dollar for dollar, our electric skylight goes for the same price as our solar-powered skylight. We see less of the electrics being sold because when you talk about installation, you need an electrician. Even though it’s the same cost per unit, your installation costs are a little bit more. With the solar skylight, we have the ability to offer a tax credit through the Federal government. The tax credit goes to the homeowner.
It’s ending in 2019 with 30%. In 2020, if you get them installed, you’re looking at a 26% Federal tax credit of all of the labor, all of the materials, and the cost of the skylight. It’s pretty fruitful. We’re not talking $50 or $100 here. It can be a few hundred dollars. If you have multiple skylights and you’re doing maybe a brand-new cut in of skylight, one where it doesn’t exist now or in a new build, all of the framing, material, and labor necessary to get that skylight in is what counts towards the total of where we’d get your tax credit from. It can be pretty significant.
Something that I’ve been reading about skylights, and one of the downsides of a skylight that I remember growing up, was that you’re at the grocery store and it starts pouring rain and the skylights are open. That’s it. You get home and it’s too bad. Now they have a sensor and it automatically closes.
If you have a solar-powered skylight or the electric one because there are mechanicals in there, there’s a rain sensor right on the outside. It’s the acoustics of the rain that it’s detecting. If a couple of drops hit that panel, it will close right down. I have those on my house. To be honest, before I placed my skylights, I would look at my phone every day because I knew the power of it cooling and freshening up my house, and if there was any type of rain in the forecast, I would forgo opening it that day.
As we get into the winter, I won’t open it unless I have to get the air out of my house. I would open it every single day regardless of whether there were thundershowers in the forecast or not. We also have the ability to hook up your skylights and your blinds, given that they are solar-powered or electric, to an app on our phone. The app is cool. Some people say, “I don’t need an app on my phone for my skylights.” In general, I would agree with that statement. What the app does is monitor our indoor air quality.
Two things have never gone out of style when you’re looking to build or improve a home—it’s daylighting and fresh air.
There is a piece that’s part of a system that we have called VELUX ACTIVE. This piece is like a thermostat. It sits on the wall of the room that your skylights are in and it monitors your temperature, CO2 and humidity. We have another piece that’s hooked up to our wall and it’s hooked up through our home Wi-Fi. Because it’s connected to the internet, it knows everything. It’s monitoring our outdoor air quality through our local weather stations. Those two will communicate back and forth.
Let’s say your humidity rises because your skylight is in your bathroom and you took a shower. Without you having to do anything but carry on with your day, your skylights are going to open and let the air out your space. At the same time, it might shade your house. For example, every day that it was more than 78 degrees outside and sunny, it would shade my house during the day. We’re not home. Most of us are working during the day, so I could go without that daylight. It would shade my house for a few hours and keep that solar heat gain down and keep my house a lot cooler than prior to having the blinds.
It automatically makes the shades go down and shades the house if it gets above a certain temperature?
Yes, that’s right. I can override that. There were some days or weekends that I was home, if I was going to be around and I wanted that light in, I either go to the remote on my wall that’s a very basic function remote or I could jump into that app, override it and open them up. I don’t have central air in my house. It’s becoming more common for people to have air conditioning. I rely on those to cool down my space.
I hear sometimes people say, “I’m never going to open them because I have air conditioning.” Air conditioning does not clean out your space. It cools your space. If we keep our windows and our house locked up and shut uptight all the time, which a lot of people do in the summertime, there is so much going on in our indoor air quality. It’s fairly unhealthy.
It’s much better to open up that space if you can. There are going to be some days where it’s oppressive outside and it’s 95 degrees. By all means, cool down your space, shut your house up, put your air conditioning on. As I had said before, our warm hot air is going to rise and it’s going to sit at the top of our roof where our skylights are.
You can use those in conjunction with your mechanicals, being your air conditioning. If you think about it, all that warm hot air up on the top of your roof has to be conditioned still. If you open those skylights for about ten minutes and let all that hot air out and then close them back down, now your air conditioning is not working as hard. With the very few days that we have here in the Northeast, I know it seems like more than less when we’re in those hot days. The majority of the year, you could rely on those to cool your space because the temperature drops a little at night.
I’m glad you brought up that point about air conditioning because it’s not magic. I don’t have air conditioning, so it could be that perspective where I feel like there are a few days a year where it is not pleasant at all. There are ways to manage the heat in your house as you were saying. The skylights are a perfect example of how you can avoid them. The more all of us get air conditioning, the worst the situation is going to be. I don’t know what to do about that because not having air conditioning because of that only means that I am suffering. I don’t think it’s helping the whole Earth but it’s okay. I can feel better about it.
I’m not saying replace air conditioning because I have a window unit in my room. On those hot days, I turn it on. Still, in the morning, my CO2 and my humidity are higher so I open up my windows and let it all out and I don’t let it run during the day. Everyone is going to control their home a little bit differently. My point is if you’re one of those people that has to have their air conditioning running all of the time, on those hot days, maybe there are 15, 20 or maybe 30 during the year, I still recommend opening up your skylights and let that air out. It’s still warming up. It’s getting hot in your house and then continue to run the air conditioning. If someone’s getting a skylight, I will always recommend a shade. I wonder if as a company, we will move forward with every skylight getting the shade type of thing. We’re not there quite yet but it doesn’t make sense why you wouldn’t, especially because of how much they can improve.
You can control so many of the complaints or the reasons why people don’t want it, with the shades.
You had mentioned that people were worried about the fading of their furniture. Whether without a shade, we use very different glass now. With the older skylights, we hear that. “I’m going to get fading on my carpet or the furniture is underneath it.” Whether you have blinds or not, the glass blocks 99.9% of the UV rays. We don’t see that regardless of whether you have a shade or not. That’s not a concern of the new age skylights.
I have a section of the show called Learning from the Mistakes of Others. I was wondering if you have any story that might illustrate mistakes that people make that they can then avoid.
The most easily made mistake that doesn’t happen too often, but more than I cared to go out on job sites is for residential, we have what we call unit skylights. It’s what people are used to seeing in a residential application. We have two different types. We have what’s called a deck-mounted skylight. If you have plywood on your roof before you have any roofing materials, this skylight gets nailed directly to the roof deck of our skylight.
We then have what’s called a curb-mounted skylight. If you could picture a shoebox, your builder or your carpenter would build a box out of 2×4 or 2×6. That makes the bottom of the shoebox, and then our skylight is the very last thing that goes on after you flash it. You put all your roofing material around there and it goes on the top of the shoebox. That curb-mounted skylight is our low slope application.
Daylight is really, really important to us as human beings. We just function better with a certain amount of light on the day-to-day.
If you have a flat roof or anything up to a three-pitch, which I believe is about 14 degrees, it is required that you use a curb-mounted skylight. That’s to get it up off the roof deck a little bit. If you had shingles on that part of the roof, we still offer a no-leak warranty because you can use a flashing kit there. That will flash that curb that the builder or contractor put there. I get the question a lot from homeowners, “How does it sit on the curb?” When that skylight goes on top, it’s going to get screwed into the curb, but there’s also a gasket system. Think of it as a good suction cup right onto that curb.
We have very few issues with those curb-mounted skylights, let alone any of our skylights. What happens sometimes is maybe we get them using it in the wrong application. For example, somebody puts a deck mount on a flat roof that I’ve seen. What’s going to happen with time is you will get a leak. It might be 2 months or 2 years, but that is the wrong application. I’ve gone to homes where those skylights that are deck mounts have been put on a slow like one pitch, maybe 5 or 10 degrees. It speaks to the deck mount of our skylight because it’s taken 2 to 3 years to leak.
The deck-mounted skylight would go directly against the roof, which is the wrong application. That’s why it ends up leaking because it’s not designed to be lying flat.
You’re not shedding water as quickly as you went on 14 degrees or greater. We try to put the information everywhere. It’s on the box. We have a little arrow saying, “This is meant for this degree of application,” and sometimes it gets missed. To the homeowner, you don’t probably care. You have a leaking skylight and you’ve probably paid a lot of money to put it in there. Now you find out three years later that it’s the wrong application.
You feel cheated from whether it be the person who specified it or the person who put it in, or the person who sold it to you. It’s a difficult conversation to have. In my opinion, it can be easily avoided. It’s pretty much everywhere in terms of literature on the box and online. That’s probably the most common that someone would have to worry about.
If you can walk on your roof, you need a curb-mounted skylight.
That’s a good rule of thumb. If you’re not sure, these apps on our phones, we have these pitch calculators. You can download an app for free. Put it on your roof and it will tell you what the degrees are there. If you think in your mind that you know it all, at least put that pitch calculator up there. I sometimes get contacted, “It’s slightly below 14 degrees.” It doesn’t matter. The degrees don’t lie. You need to use a curb-mounted skylight so that you have the best performing skylight that you can have.
In theory, you could err on the other side and use a curb-mounted skylight on a pitched roof and it wouldn’t matter.
We can go up to about 60 degrees with the curb mount. Sometimes we have a lot of deck mounts that are the same size as the curb mounts that we offer, but there are a few that overlap that we don’t offer. Sometimes people maybe replace an old manufactured skylight. Let’s say it’s a ten pitch and it’s a fairly steep roof. We don’t have a deck mount in that size, so they just put a curb mount in there and you can do that.
It seems like skylights have come a long way since the ‘70s when I slept underneath a leaking part around my skylights, but these were also on the vineyard in an old building that who even knows why they were leaking so much. A lot of people have memories of that from a long time ago. These skylights have come a long way. I’m excited about apps that can control your house from anywhere anyway, but they can customize the skylights for what we need them to be.
I’ll say one last thing. For anybody who maybe needs to replace their skylights or thinking about skylights, skylights are no different than any other products that we have in our house. They have a shelf life and eventually, they need to be replaced. I don’t know why skylights live by a certain rule. If anybody else had an old slider door, a front door, a vertical window, or another opening in the envelope of our house that was starting to age and maybe showing signs of failure and leaking, they would not hesitate. They would replace that type of window or door.
For whatever reason, skylights are living in a different rule book because as soon as people see, “That thing is a piece of crap. We got to board it up.” It’s showing signs of failure. To give people an idea, I would say anywhere from 20 to 30 years or maybe 35 years, that’s the average life of a skylight. A good rule of thumb and at least for replacement is if you’re replacing your roof. Roofing has also come a long way. A roof is a system on your house and it keeps your house breathing. It’s like a living organism.
Skylights are very much a part of that roofing system. You cannot put a brand-new roof around a 25-year-old skylight or even a 30-year-old skylight and expect it to last much longer. You got to replace the two together and let them coagulate together as part of your roofing system because that’s what they are. I do get a lot of calls after somebody reroofed their house. They got this brand-new roof on their house. It’s going to last 30 years with a 30-year-old skylight.
I’ve been trying to find a good analogy but the best I could come up with is let’s say you’re driving a 25-year-old car. It’s fairly reliable but it’s showing signs of wear and tear. You say, “I think I’m going to replace the windshield on my car then I’m going to keep cruising.” It doesn’t work like that. There are a lot of parts and pieces on the skylight. You’re going to get the best use out of it if you’re going to replace the whole thing when you need to.
A lot of my skylight questions have been answered. Hopefully, our audience feels the same.
I hope so too.
I appreciate your time. Thank you so much.
You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me.
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About Laureyn Furtney
Co-Owner at Synergy Skylights