ABSTRACT
Although daylight and sunlight are excellent and desirable sources of illumination for buildings there are occasions when they are not suffi - cient. The most obvious time is at night, but there will be situations where a room is too big to be naturally lit, where controlled levels of illumination are required or where tasks require a specifi c minimum and consistent level of lighting. In these circumstances artifi cial lighting must be used to supplement or replace natural light. However, artifi cial lighting is expensive to use, requires electricity generated by fossil fuels and lamps can contain environmentally harmful materials such as mercury. Therefore, a sustainable building design will attempt to limit the use of artifi cial lighting through the right choice of lamp and integration with natural lighting. In this chapter the basic principles and properties of various lamps are described.
