Meet FreeLite's Steve Charlson, and son Matt Charlson
America's de facto Daylighting Product Performance Experts
I'm Steve Charlson, co-owner and operator with my son Matt, of FreeLite "The Skylight Company". Not much has changed in the skylight business since the current owners of the four FreeLites started what is now Tucson's Desert Skylights back in the late '70's. "There aren't any skylight schools" we would sheepishly inform customers holding us to the product performance guarantees and service standards that united us then as it still does long after our split in the early '80's. Accountability for product performance promises quickly certified our expertise then, just as Matt keeping current promises to recent customers legitimizes him in ways that his 15 years (intermittent) as apprentice at my skylight school never could. Education and theory are critical components for understanding all dynamic systems; once experience teaches all the critical lessons, we use theory to organize and condense the information for more efficient transmission. At least in theory.
Misconceptions and just plain ignorance underlie most skylight system issues. 1) Skylights are multidimensional dynamic systems sharing aesthetic intentions and critical functions. The units themselves are commodities. Expensive, energy wasting views attend ALL transparent glazings, regardless coats, tints, layers, and configurations. There is no such thing as energy efficient transparent glazing, not yet, anyway. FreeView is an impossibility, as of published papers through May, 2009. Free light, in stark contrast, is a near certainty with white translucent acrylic, regardless frame material and construction, number of layers (provided acrylic pigments are proportioned properly), or any of the other faux-properties invented by glass sellers to muddy the waters.
Restating the fundamental fact of daylighting: views are energy hogs browning forever self-proclaimed 'Green' adherents claiming otherwise. FreeLite's unconditional guaranty of highest quality light at the least heat cost with white acrylic glazing remains our most loyalty inspiring product and most direct proof of our preeminence among national and international daylighting experts, even as the 'Big Lies' of 'special glass coatings' and 'super-efficient frames' gain emotionally invested adherents.
Transparent glazings are worse than energy hogs, they're horrible light sources. Whereas white acrylic Lambertian diffuses light evenly in all directions, defining optimum lighting conditions, transparent glazings degrade daylight into glare and heat sources requiring complex and expensive controls to minimize collateral damage. Ironically, 'experts' deriding the perfect light from white acrylic as 'comparable to florescent fixtures' reveal double ignorance with such assertions. Florescent lighting averages ten times the efficiency and efficacy of daylight through glass with less than half the quality performance of white acrylic. (See the IEA Task Force #21 in our Truth and Tragedy at DoE/EPA.)
Equally obfuscated drainage fundamentals plague skylights today as much or more as thirty years ago. Expertise likewise follows from honoring performance promises much more so than mastering theoretical probability distribution curves for potential drainage paths. Or as we like to say when reality seems to break its own rules, "somebody tell the water it can't do that." I honestly do not believe some of what I've witnessed and 'fixed', preferring to forget the incidents and their implications.
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