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Comment by seanalltogether | Hacker News Reader

Automated blinds can also have a good effect on temperature control. In the summer you can have your south facing blinds automatically close when you leave the house to block out the sun.

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I have that, but for my entire house - in the Summer the walls get covered with sun blocking plates, and in the winter the walls are exposed to the rays of the sun.

If you want your own, you can buy it, it's called: Parthenocissus tricuspidata or you can get the Parthenocissus quinquefolia.

It really does work!

Spent a minute trying to figure out if I just walked into a botany version of the rickroll xD

Don't they damage the underlying brick work or other stuff? I think I've heard something like that before.

The kind with piercing tendrils does, but the species I listed have glue pads that cause no harm.

You do need to manage windows and gutters. What you do is pull the vine of off the border of the window and leave it dangling in the air (a little bit of it). This signals to the vine that it reached the end of what it's sitting on, and it will stop growing there. (If you cut it instead, it thinks it has an opportunity.)

Does it not create humidity issues? I always liked that look but I live in Belgium where it can be way too rainy in spring/autumn and i'd assume there'd be leaves then.

No humidity issues, the leaves have lots of space between them - they arrange themselves to catch every bit of sun as seen in 2D from a distance, but up close some stick out farther, some are closer, and there's plenty of air flow.

So that's a funny thing, your blinds are on the inside of your house so the sun energy is hitting them and dissipating from there. Hopefully your blinds are white and reflecting more of it out than the other surfaces it would otherwise hit. But if you want to make a real temperature difference you need blinds on the other side of the insulated box otherwise known as an awning.

The only tricky part being that it's desirable to limit the amount of sun shining into the house in the warmer months, but not the cooler ones. Awnings that fold or are otherwise removable are a reasonable solution, there are also sunshades which mount outside, and also use a spinning rod to raise and lower (if the electronics and motor here could be weatherproofed a little they might be quite usable).

Having the blind close to the window and covering at least a extra 6 inches or 15 cm band around edge of window significantly reduces light spillage into the room, when the blind is down, in my experience.

In cooler months the sun is lower over the horizon so the awning block less of it.

Indeed. Our 100 year old house has exactly the right-sized roof overhangs to shade to the bottom of the upper floor windows for the peak sun periods in the summer while still letting much of the winter sun in.

Then, for the lower floor we accomplish a similar effect with tall, deciduous plantings.

If you've ever encountered German rolladen you'll forget all about awnings.

Awnings are, IMO strictly better than those:

- You never have to move them

- In the summer (when the sun is higher) it blocks out lots of sun

- In the winter (when the sun is lower) it lets in more sun

With a properly designed house your roof overhangs should already take care of that: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e5e91c81d669b...

https://www.house-energy.com/images/Overhang.gif

I feel like we design houses like we design cars and many other modern things, form over function and fix the problems by adding a ton of overcomplicated technologies.

If you have huge openings and no overhangs I'd go for something like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPNMp6pMJjk

SOUTH (or NORTH) is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there!

What about houses with more than one level? The overhangs help not at all on the ground-floor.

You've never been in a room during the day with the rolladen all the way down. It's pitch black. It's pretty great. The good ones that separate slowly when rising also let you infinitely adjust the level of light and outside air that comes in.

Rolladen are superior because they can actually block 99.999999% of light when you want to watch a movie during a bright summer day or want to adjust your sleep schedule before travel.

You can 100% achieve a real temperature difference with unpainted wooden internal blinds. I'm sure you can achieve much more with an ideal setup but just sharing from experience, what OP has can easily make a difference of several degrees.

> unpainted wooden

can you please elaborate on this? logic dictates that if you cover the whole thing with plastic (paint) it will affect the performance of the material (I assume reflecting light (paint) vs absorbing light (raw wood).

I think you should read it as "even with unpainted wooden blinds". The right paint should indeed be better.

Exactly

Yep, that's a big one. Blinds that respond to sun position or presence can do wonders for keeping indoor temps stable

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