What is this standard about?
Building occupants strongly favour daylight as a way to adequately illuminate indoor spaces and save energy. This new European standard encourages building designers to assess day-lit spaces in buildings and ensure they’re successful.
It looks at the environment surrounding a building, components immediately around the daylight openings, and the configuration of interior spaces to help those who design and light buildings to use daylight well.
It also allows building designers and developers to target ambitions with respect to daylighting, as well as tackle other issues related to daylight design, such as view out, protection against glare and exposure to sunlight.
Who is this standard for?
- Building designers and architects
- Developers
- Lighting engineers and others involved in lighting design
- Planners
Why should you use this standard?
It specifies elements for achieving, by means of natural light, an adequate subjective impression of lightness indoors, and for providing an adequate view out. As well, recommendations for the duration of sunshine exposure within occupied rooms are given.
The standard gives information on how to use daylighting to provide lighting within interiors, and how to limit glare. It defines metrics used for the evaluation of daylighting conditions and gives principles of calculation and verification. These principles allow users to deal with the issue of variability of daylight over the course of a day and year.
NOTE: BS EN 17037 applies to all spaces that may be regularly occupied by people for extended periods except where daylighting is contrary to the nature and role of the actual work done. The specification of lighting requirements for humans in indoor work places including visual tasks are given in BS EN 12464-1 and are not part of this document.
What’s changed since the last update?
This all-new European standard supersedes the British Standard BS 8206-2:2008 "Lighting for buildings. Code of practice for daylighting. BS EN 17037 contains a lot of new material including:
- The use of median daylight illuminance
- A new metric for daylight glare
- A new assessment method for sunlight in buildings
- New ways of assessing view