Heat Blocking Shades & Blinds

A west or south facing window turns the room behind it into the hottest room in the house by mid afternoon, and the complaint is usually three things at once: the sun is in your eyes, the room is uncomfortable, and you still want to see out. That last part rules most answers out, because a fabric that stops all the sun also stops the view. The shades and blinds here are chosen by how much sun they stop.

Which shades and blinds to put on a sunny window

Solar shades are the starting point, and the only family we sell specified by openness rather than fabric name. Openness is the trade between view and screening, and the numbers are published: a 1% screen is rated at 80% shading, 3% at 70%, 5% at 60% and 10% at 50%. A 1% or 3% screen on a west facing wall takes out the worst of the afternoon while leaving the view intact. A 5% or 10% screen suits an east or north wall where you want to give up less of the view.

Light filtering roller shades cover the same daytime brief in a wider fabric range when the look of the room matters more than the view. Their shading runs from roughly 45% to 70% by series, so read the figure rather than the name.

Blackout roller shades are for when you want the sun stopped rather than screened, in a room where losing the view for part of the day is acceptable. Our blackout goods are specified at 100% blackout, and the heaviest is a sunscreen blackout at 663 g/m2. Light filtering and blackout cellular are worth pairing in on a room you use in every season, since the pleated cell sits between the glass and the room rather than hanging flat against it.

Worth saying plainly: Coverly publishes a shading percentage for every fabric, not a heat gain or R value. Shading percentage is what the specification establishes, so it is the number to compare these on.

Widths, roll widths and where the sizes stop

Sunny walls hold the biggest windows in the house, so width usually decides the order. Light filtering roller fabrics reach 96 inches wide on our standard cassettes and 98 3/8 inches on the larger ones, while blackout and sunscreen goods stop at 86 or 94 1/2 inches on the same hardware, because the heavier fabrics are milled on narrower rolls.

Fabric roll width also overrides the system maximum: two of ours are milled at 90 and 90.6 inches and cannot fill a 96 inch opening on any system. Most sunscreen fabrics run on 118 inch rolls, which is why solar has the most headroom here.

Anything over 100 inches high moves to the 43 mm tube and the large cassette, reaching 118 inches wide and 120 inches high. That is a load question, not a preference: a 38 mm tube will not carry that drop. If you want the run motorised, check minimum width first, since a motorised roller needs 8 to 10 inches more than the manual version of the same shade, and motorised cellular at 38 mm needs 23 inches and caps at 79 inches high.

Measuring and installing them yourself

Measure each opening separately even when the windows look identical. For an inside mount, reduce the measured width by 1/4 inch to clear the frame. For an outside mount, add roughly 3 7/8 inches to width and height, which closes the light gap at the edges.

Installation is a bracket job. You need a 6 mm drill bit, the brackets mark at 1.1 inch screw spacing, and two anchor types ship in the box, so pick the one matching your wall. Each bracket has four pre-drilled holes, and two screws on opposite sides hold fine, with the other two there for wide or heavy shades.

Order samples before you settle on an openness percentage, because the difference between a 1% and a 5% screen is hard to judge from a photo. Everything here is made to your measurements, shipped direct, and carries a limited lifetime warranty against defects.