Falcon St Apartments
11 June 2015
This commercial building in heart of Parnell has been converted to an up market, multi-level apartment complex. It is a mixed use building with the bottom floor as retail or office space and the top three floors as apartments.
Objective:
Part of the challenge of converting the building from a commercial space to a residential space was introducing more daylight.
There were a number of spaces located further into the depths of the building that received little to no natural light. For example, one room was 8m away from an external window. All bedrooms had no natural light source and that meant they couldn’t be classed as a bedroom at that point.
To meet compliance under the New Zealand Building Code for bedroom spaces each bedroom had to have a natural light source (Building Code Clause G7 - Natural Light). Solution
The top floor was bought up to compliance with traditional daylighting methods but the two apartments below were more of a challenge.
John Jensen, of John Jensen Design, approached HomeTech Solatube to create a daylighting design to bring the 2nd and 3rd floor bedrooms up to compliance. HomeTech Solatube created a design using 5 Solatube Daylighting Systems to provide a natural light source to each room that delivered a minimum of 33 Lux at floor level for 75% of the year.
Two Solatube 290 Daylighting Systems were installed in the 3rd floor bedrooms with a tubing drop of 5m.
These two systems had a fire damper installed to stop the spread of fire from the 3rd floor to the top floor apartment. This was a requirement of the building code. The fire damper basically consists of 2 damper flaps held by a brass link that will give way 71 degrees Celsius and drop the flaps. The damper flaps are covered in an intumescent material that when engaged will expand and will stop the spread of fire for an hour.
On the 2nd floor of the building, one Solatube 750 Daylighting System was installed in a larger bedroom and two Solatube 290 Daylighting Systems were installed in two other bedrooms. The tubing for these systems had to go down 8m through the two tenancies above in a purpose built service shaft. This shaft was fire rated and was ‘boxed out’ in the apartments to just look like a pillar.
Products used:
4 x Solatube 290 DS , 1 x Solatube 750 DS, Fire damper on 2 x Solatube
290 DS
Testimonial:
“To efficiently supply daylight to rooms over 8 meters down is no mean feat. We knew we could rely on HomeTech Solatube to provide a daylighting design that we could deliver to council and be confident that it complied with code. No other company could provide us with this solution. We have worked with HomeTech Solatube on similar projects in the past they provide us with an excellent, tried and tested solution.
Solatube Daylighting Solutions are a revolutionary product, even with the lengths of the drops we had in this project the product was able to deliver 99.7% of light captured on the roof to the rooms below. They were also unobtrusive visually and took up minimal space in the apartments they went through.
- Rick Hassett, Project Manager/Builder.
