6 Tips to Save on Energy Costs Using Automated Window Blinds
Properly controlling your window blinds can greatly affect the comfort and energy usage of your home. Window blinds can keep summer heat out, winter heat in, and limit your need to turn up the air conditioning or heat in your home. Here are some tips on how to reduce your energy consumption throughout the year using automated window blinds.
Summer Energy Saving Tips
Blinds reflect light energy out that would otherwise become heat energy inside your home. When direct sunlight enters your home in an uncontrolled way, it creates unwanted solar heat gain.
1. Close your blinds when direct light is present (generally in the morning and afternoon).
By controlling your blinds properly, you can save 10 – 15% on what you spend on cooling, in addition to enjoying a comfortable home on hot summer days.
2. Slightly tilt your blinds at night to allow heat to escape.
It may seem counterintuitive but slightly opening up your blinds at nighttime can help the heat escape from your rooms in the hot summer nights. With the hot air leaving your rooms, you can again further reduce your dependency on the A/C. Only opening them slightly allows you to maintain privacy.
Fall & Winter Tips to Save on Energy Costs
3. When warming up your home, close your blinds to keep the heat in.
The heat in your home escapes through your windows. By closing your blinds, you can add some insulation to your windows which reduce heat loss. This is most effective during the nights, in both the winter and on plain cold nights.
4. Open your blinds on sunny days to let heat in.
On sunny days in the winter, you can harness sunlight by allowing it to enter through the windows to heat up your rooms. It’s actually an effective strategy that office spaces use to lower energy consumption in large commercial buildings.
Smarter Management of Your Home
By being able to simply control your blinds with your phone, a remote, or your voice you can easily program your home to conserve energy most effectively, all while saving your precious time. It’s a lot easier to set everything at once than it is to get up and manually make all these energy saving changes throughout the day. When you’re not home, it becomes impossible to do this manually.
5. Set schedules using the above tips to make things more convenient.
Including your blinds in a smart home ecosystem enhances these tips (and the convenience) even further. Sensors around your home and other smart devices communicate with each other to automate this entire process for you. Sudden changes in the weather can affect the schedules that you painstakingly created, but when you have your smart home ecosystem set up, your home will adapt to weather conditions so that you are always optimizing your energy usage.
Need help prioritizing which devices to include in your smart home ecosystem or wondering where to start? Read this easy guide.
6. Use sensors and smart home devices to automate the entire process for maximum convenience.
iblinds uses the Z-Wave wireless protocol which ensures that all Z-Wave products work together with each other regardless of brand, including backward-compatibility between versions. This makes iblinds a perfect addition into creating your perfect Smart Home, and an impressive upgrade to the smart home you already have set up.
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