Skylight Coverings that Give You More Light Control
Skylights are a dream come true if you want to let as much natural light as possible into your home. Skylights on the south-facing side even help keep down heat and lighting costs in the winter. The tricky part is what to do when summer rolls around. How do you let the light in and keep the heat out?
It all depends on how you use the room with the skylight windows. Is it a room of extremes where you want full sunlight at times and complete blackout for the rest? Or do you welcome constant natural light in the room, but just angled away from certain areas? Your answer will determine the skylight covering that best fits your needs:
Room of extremes
Maybe it’s your living room that also doubles as a home theatre. Or it could be the nursery that needs light during playtime and darkness during naptime. In either case, roller shades are your best bet. Specifically, these are specialized roller shades for skylights that operate on a sloped angle. Here’s the neat part: many of your favourite roller shades and roller blinds (which we’ll get to next) can be converted to skylight coverings. Just pick out which ones and we can help you customize them.
Roller shades work very well in preventing heat gain from the high-angle sun rays that come through skylights. And if you want to have absolute darkness sometimes, go with blackout blinds. You can also make the shades extra effective at keeping the room cool by using double-pleated honeycomb shades or cellular blinds. These have pockets of air woven into their material to better insulate the room from the hot sun.
Best of both worlds
A room like your home office is somewhere you’d want lots of natural light, but not at an angle that would create sun glare on your monitor. Roller blinds and Venetian blinds give you the control to deflect incoming sunlight to a different area in the room. This way, you don’t have to sacrifice any valuable sun-time in the summer!
Fine-tuning the slat angles throughout the day is a piece of cake even if you’re doing it manually. They all have extra-long adjustment wands to give you easy tweaking access. To open and close skylight covers on high ceilings, you can also get extendable poles to hook onto built-in hand cranks.
The most convenient solution though is installing motorized blinds that give you total control with a click of a remote. And you don’t even have to worry whether the extendable pole is long enough to reach the skylight!
The strange thing about summer is that it’s the time when we suddenly regain our memories of why shade is amazing as we pant through the dog days of summer. (By the way, fun trivia: this phrase didn’t originally mean what you think it means).
Proper skylight coverings allow you to enjoy and appreciate shade in the summer. As an added bonus, you get to boost energy efficiency at home and preserve the finishes of your furniture. Now that’s something to raise a cold beverage to!
