Can I use light pipes such as Solatube in FlucsPro?
Yes, there are two ways.
1. You could model the light pipes with highly reflective tubular columns with glazed surfaces at each end. However this would not take into account any light gathering device at the top or the way the diffuser spreads the light at the bottom.
2. If relevant photometric data is available for the location of your project, you could model them as "luminaires". For example, for Solatube, the IESNA files are in http://www.solatube.com/downloads/Solatube40.zip.
Because the lumen output depends on the daylight available, these files are based on a standard location, so, in http://www.solatube.com/downloads/lumens.pdf there is a table for each Solatube, giving the lumen output for many US cities and just a few non-US cities. Each city has max, ave and min values, for the brightest 2400, 1800 or 1200 hours of the year. The website says you can apply these figures by adjusting the "lumens/lamp" in your design software rather than tinker with the value in the IESNA file.
FlucsPro has no such dialogue box to directly adjust this value, but here is a simple example of how to do it (to see the 21 inch Solatube's 2400 hour average for London):
Go into the database using the "Select" button in LightPro. Import the IES file for the Solatube you want to use. In the Luminaires section, click the luminaire you just imported. In the Colours section, double-click the (only) colour to edit it. Change the "Initial bare lamp output (lm)" to the average value obtained from the lumen output table for London over 2400 hours (i.e. 7032 lumens for the 21 inch Solatube). Exit from the database. Solatube recommend a Light Loss Factor of 0.92. Set the Luminaire Maintenance Factor for each room to 1 and the Lamp Lumen Maintenance Factor for each room to a fixed value of 0.92 (instead of using the replacement period to obtain it from the LLMF curve). Place the Solatubes in rooms. Do the calculations (remember you are now doing an artificial lighting calculation, not daylight, so you will need to use FlucsPro not FlucsDL). Repeat for max, min, different cities, etc. by just changing the "Initial bare lamp output (lm)" of the colour. You could add and edit copies of the colour instead.
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