The short answer
Yes, for the right kitchen. A sun tunnel suits a galley, a windowless inner kitchen or a dark corner behind the worktops, where a small, soft pool of daylight is all the room is missing. A wide open-plan kitchen with a dining area needs more glass than a tube can give, and a rooflight or lantern is the better choice there.
The kitchens a tunnel suits
A tunnel is a spot of daylight, not a wash of it. It works best where the dark part of the room is small and you know exactly where it is.
Think of the 1950s and 1960s houses across Crawley's neighbourhoods, where the kitchen is a narrow room at the back with one small window and a wall of units. The worktop in the middle of that room is often in shadow by mid-morning. A tubular skylight over that spot puts soft daylight on the surface where the chopping happens, and the diffuser on the ceiling reads like a pale, round light fitting that happens to be lit by the sky.
The same holds for a kitchen that was borrowed from an old hallway or pantry, and for one fitted under a bedroom with no roof directly above it. A tunnel can be fitted in any of these, as long as there is a route for the tube between the roof and the ceiling. Our page on whether a sun tunnel can pass through an upstairs room explains what happens when there is a bedroom in the way.
Where a tunnel falls short
The limit is the size of the opening. A tunnel is a small aperture, so it cannot light a whole room the way a window or a large rooflight does.
A kitchen extension with a dining table, a sofa and bifold doors is a big, deep space, and a single tunnel would leave most of it as it was. A row of several tunnels can cover a longer room, but by the time you have fitted three or four, a single flat rooflight or lantern may light the space more evenly for similar effort. The comparison is set out in our guide to choosing between a sun tunnel and a rooflight for a dark room.
A tunnel also gives you nothing to look up through, no opening for air and no feeling of height. If the kitchen is where the family sits, a flat roof rooflight or a roof lantern does more of what a kitchen asks of a roof.
Four questions to settle before a tunnel goes in
These are the points we look at on the survey, in this order.
- Where is the dark spot? The diffuser should sit over the worktop or the walkway, not over a wall unit. A tunnel ending above tall cupboards lights the cupboards.
- What is between the roof and the ceiling? A straight drop gives the brightest result. Each bend costs some light, which is explained in our page on tunnel length, bends and how much light arrives.
- Which way does the roof face? A south or west slope feeds the tunnel for more of the day. A north slope gives gentler, steadier light, which many cooks prefer.
- What else does the ceiling carry? Extractors, downlights and pipework all compete for the same space, so the tunnel is planned around them.
Cooking, steam and the diffuser
A kitchen is a harder place for a sun tunnel than a landing is, because of steam and warm, greasy air.
A sealed diffuser stops kitchen air reaching the inside of the tube, where it could condense on a cold metal wall and run back down. A tube with an insulated sleeve through the loft cuts that risk further. Our guide to preventing condensation in a sun tunnel goes through the detail, and the cleaning side, for a diffuser over a hob area, is in how you clean a sun tunnel.
The tunnel does not replace the extractor. Part F of the Building Regulations covers ventilation, and a cooker hood or fan has to do its job whether or not daylight is coming in. The tunnel is placed so that it does not sit in the same ceiling zone as the hood, and so that the fan path is left clear. It is a daylight source, and it sits alongside the ventilation.
Quiet and warm, as well as bright
A kitchen is a hard-surfaced room, so any noise from the roof carries. A well-fitted tunnel keeps that in check.
Rain on the dome can be heard in the room below if the dome is thin or the flashing is loose. A sealed, lined tube and a firmly seated dome keep the sound down, and keeping a sun tunnel quiet in the rain explains how. The dome and tube we propose are named in the quiet spec that comes with every quote, so the choice is written down before the job starts. The work is installed to current Building Regulations, with the Building Control notification handled where the job is notifiable.
Kitchen questions, answered
Will a tunnel light the whole kitchen?
It lights the area around its diffuser. In a narrow galley that may be most of the room. In a larger kitchen it lights a zone, and other sources light the rest.
Does a bigger tube make a real difference?
Yes, because a wider tube collects more daylight. Our page on choosing a sun tunnel diameter explains how to match the size to the room.
Can a tunnel go through a flat kitchen roof?
Yes. A flat roof has its own kerb and upstand detail, described in sun tunnels on flat roofs.
Will it be dark in the evening?
A tunnel runs on daylight, so it gives nothing after dusk. Your ordinary kitchen lighting takes over, and the tunnel spares you from switching it on during the day.
If your kitchen has a dark corner that daylight never reaches, get a quote and we will look at the roof and ceiling on the survey. The full service is on our sun tunnel installation page.