Natural light streaming into your home may enliven the room and it offers you a view. However, sun-facing rooms take on solar heat gain, which can drive up your cooling bills, wear out your A/C, and make your home less than comfortable. Does any of this ring a bell? If so, read on to learn how solar shades may alleviate these common summer problems.
Here Comes the Sun
For your home to be comfortable, your A/C unit must keep up with the demand — or cooling load. The greater the load, the longer your A/C unit must run to keep up. This uses a lot of energy. Coupled with additional solar heat gain on sunny and hot days, your A/C may run almost continuously — especially if your A/C wasn’t sized correctly.
So, solar heat gain causes a host of problems, and the problems compound.
- The sun-facing part of your home absorbs short-wave radiation from the sun.
- Your home, your furniture, and building materials heat up.
- Heat is released from these objects in longer wavelengths.
- Here’s the twist: your windows transmit longer wavelength heat much slower than the short-wave heat gain from the sun.
- The bottom line is that your windows are taking on much more heat than they can get rid of.
Solar Shades Beautify and Save Energy
Solar shades (also called solar screens) may be beautiful, charming, or sophisticated, depending on your design and tastes. Your rooms will be more attractive and experience much less temperature variances for more balanced comfort. These benefits make solar screens exciting alternatives to your high cooling bills.
Solar screens may be installed with automatic operation, on tracks for easy adjusting, or just manually rolled up and down. They are available in many transparency choices and colors.
- Privacy: Allow light into your rooms, but you can’t see in or out of rooms.
- Screen: You can see in and out of rooms with screen shades.
- Blackout: If you want a very dark room, use blackout solar shades.
If solar shades seem like a bright idea for your Indianapolis home, contact Mowery Heating, Cooling and Plumbing today!
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Brownsburg, Indiana and surrounding areas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).
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