Category : Insulating Blinds

How Do Blinds Affect Your Home Insulation?

Did you know windows and blinds play a huge role in your home insulation? There’s so much focus on the walls and the type of insulation filling them that people frequently forget about windows. Windows can make or break your home’s insulation. You know that saying: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Well, a window can be your home’s weakest link. Let’s talk about how you can keep your home well insulated by buying the right blinds.

Windows and Insulation

What many people don’t know is that modern windows are actually insulated already! You might have some guesses about how. Some people assume having two panes of glass is inherently insulating. The truth is, there is an actual gas between the panes that insulates the window.

Windows have been made with gas insulation for decades. The gas used is completely transparent and is denser than air. That makes it great for keeping out heat or cold. While there’s a lot to be said on how insulation works, what’s really important is noting that windows are already insulated. However, this insulation is not as strong as a solid wall with insulation inside of it. Therefore, your window is still your weakest link.

This is especially important to note if your home is old or you’ve never had your windows replaced. After decades of use, windows will begin to lose the effectiveness of their seal and the gas will begin to leak out. Therefore, they lose their insulation over time.

How Do Blinds Affect Your Home Insulation?

If you want to improve your windows’ insulation so that they’re slightly less of a weak link, blinds are the next step. If you can’t afford to replace old windows, good blinds can also help make up for the loss of insulation in the window itself.

Because of how insulation works, the more layers between one temperature and another, and the material those layers are made of, improves the insulation. The layers and materials keep the temperatures separate. Therefore, adding blinds to the mix helps keep the cold or heat that’s managed to make it past the window from getting to your interior as fast.

Which Blinds Insulate the Best?

To get the best insulation from your blinds, you’ll want one or more of a few different qualities.

1. Multiple layers in blinds make them better insulators. The more layers, the more effective they are than a single layer of the same material. Because of this, honeycomb blinds, which have cells of air between their layers, are a good choice. Sheer vertical blinds are also great, as they have two layers of fabric.
2. Blinds that completely cover a window are better insulators because they block gaps where cold or heat can get through. The same way a draft from an open window or rays of sunlight can get in past a gap in your blinds, temperature that’s transferred through the window can get through these spaces easier as well. Blinds like roller shades with side channels completely cover all gaps between the window frame and blinds. Sheer vertical blinds can also help minimize gaps by being pulled flush with the window frame.
3. A thick fabric is also more effective than something thinner, as it’s harder for any affected air to get past it. The double layer of sheer vertical blinds includes a thicker layer that’s heavy enough to block out sunlight entirely.

Buying Quality Blinds

You can probably guess how ineffective standard, slatted blinds are for home insulation. With so many gaps and, frequently, being made of metal, these blinds do virtually nothing to insulate. Buy quality blinds from Domir and keep your home the temperature you pay the electric company to make it. Don’t fall victim to poor window insulation wasting your money.

Reduce Heat This Summer with Insulating Blinds

Tired of the summer heat always driving your electric bill through the roof? Or, if you don’t have an air conditioner, you’re probably pretty overheated in your home. You might be surprised, but Domir Blinds can help with that. That’s because insulating blinds help reduce heat in the home. Let’s see how some new blinds might be able to help you save money and live more comfortably in the summertime.

How Does Insulation Work?

You might not have known that blinds can insulate. A lot of people don’t. The fact is, blinds can be very effective insulators. What is it that makes them insulate though?

It really comes down to what insulation is and how temperature changes. Heat is caused when atoms are moving very quickly. Cold is caused when atoms are moving very slowly. When hot and cold come into contact with each other, the hot and cold atoms collide. This collision leads to fast atoms bumping into slow atoms. The fast ones push the slow ones into a higher speed and the slow ones force the fast ones to slow down a bit. 

As time passes, the speed of the atoms’ vibration will find a middle ground. That is, unless the source of the heat is the entire outdoors. In that case, your home is likely to get very hot and make no noticeable difference to the rest of the world.

Insulation is any kind of middle ground between two contrasting temperatures. This will keep fast and slow atoms from interacting with each other and changing the temperature. 

Insulating Blinds

So, now that we’ve got the basics of insulation down, you might wonder how blinds do this. The truth is, it gets kind of complicated. Certain surfaces, like glass, transfer temperature very easily. That makes windows a huge temperature leaking point in our homes.

Covering a window with something solid that won’t transfer temperature as easily can mitigate the temperature leakage of the window. That makes fabric blinds and blinds with multiple layers of fabric great insulators. Fast atoms are forced to slow down if they want to move through something like fabric. The more times they have to move through a layer, the less intense their speed.

Choosing Your Blinds

So, which blinds are made up of insulating layers like this?

• The Ninet is one of Domir’s original designs. These blinds are made up of two fabric layers with standard, slatted blinds between them. This allows you to control how much light enters your home while maintaining 100% privacy in all cases.
• Honeycomb blinds allow less light control, but do a great job at insulating. These are made to be opened up or put down. When down, they provide two layers of insulating fabric.
• Blackout roller shades are another great option. Because these are made with such a thick layer for blocking out sunlight, they can actually do a pretty good job insulating. Though, they are the inferior insulating choice when compared with the previous two options. These roller shades can be combines with side channels to prevent as much temperature leakage as possible while also blocking out sunlight.

Shop Domir

Regardless of which blinds are right for you, you can get them right here in Toronto from Domir. Because we’re the manufacturer, you can even cut out middleman price gauges. Get the best price you can from us. Give us a call if you have questions or would like help with your order.