Solar Shades
Pros and Cons of Solar Shades
Introduction
Solar shades are relatively new additions to the marketplace of shades, but they have quickly become popular because of the excellent green aspects that they have to them. They are not perfect, but they do appeal quite aggressively to a certain segment of the population. To find out if you are one of those people, take a look at the advantages and disadvantages that these shades have.
Pros
The green aspect of solar shades should be the main pro in the mind of anyone that is considering purchasing this product. Solar shades are built in a way that is far more environmentally friendly than just about any other product in the competition. This is because solar shades are constructed specifically with energy savings in mind. If you include solar shades in a room, you will be reducing the amount of energy that you have to put into changing the temperature of the room by a significant amount. Solar shades keep rooms cool during the summer months to a degree that is unmatched by any other type of shade. No matter how you slice it, solar shades are definitely the eco-friendly option within the shades category.
Solar shades also have the ability to help the individual at the same time that they are helping the individual help the environment. The main reason for this has to do with incoming solar radiation in the ultraviolet section of the light spectrum. This type of light is blocked along with a lot of the other light by the solar shades. The good news when it comes to this type of light is that UV rays are naturally harmful to human skin and over the course of prolonged exposure can cause serious health problems. This can happen even to someone sitting in front of a window multiple hours a day. The solar shades will block the incoming UV radiation, ensuring a better long term health outcome for prolonged sitting in front of that particular window in the process.
A third strength of solar shades is the excellent ability to manage glare. If you have a window that is projecting an unreasonable amount of glare on a computer or television screen, you can manage that glare quite effectively through the use of solar shades while at the same time maintaining the view through the window that you might enjoy looking at. It is not necessarily a bad thing to have shades that are not made out of opaque material for this reason. Solar shades can cut down on light transfer which in turn has a significant effect when it comes to reducing the amount of glare that you can see.
Finally, the basic shades are also very cheap. Basic solar shades can cost you as little as $30 for an entire window depending on the size of the window and the options that you want included with the shade products. Generally speaking, even with heavier options you won’t pay more than $70 for the basic products. When compared with some of the other products out there, these shades are very reasonably priced. That means that they’ll be saving you purchasing power at the time of purchase and energy power after the purchase.
Cons
The main drawback to solar shades is that you are not going to get a shred of privacy if you install these shades over your windows. The main point of solar shades is not really to provide you with privacy from a particular window. The main point of solar shades is to manage the light and heat travelling into a room in a way that is environmentally friendly and easy on your pocketbook. In order to do this to the high standards that solar shades have created, it is necessary to sacrifice some other aspects of shades that have been considered traditional. The way the science of the shades works, opaque material is one of these things. When opaque material is taken off the table as a potential materials choice, naturally the privacy that the shades can provide will be reduced by a significant amount.
At the current moment in time, solar shades are extremely limited when it comes to design options and visual value. The fact of the matter is that this is always likely to be the case since solar shades are far more functional in nature than they are visual. You can get all of the excellent advantages that were mentioned above, but you are going to have to pay for those advantages through the lack of extra options. For some people, this is perfectly fine. For people that want beautiful decorative shades however, solar shades are going to struggle in order to provide the type of visual excellence that you are looking for. Sometimes, you’ll struggle to even find solar shades across the basic range of colors, something that should indicate to you just how futile it is to try.
One final con worth talking about when it comes to solar shades is the fact that folding them requires a little bit of acrobatics on your part. It is actually a lot better in the case of solar shades to just leave them on all the time at full stretch. Over the course of time, folding will create cracks in the solar shades that in turn will cause massive problems in the overall sheen covering each solar shade. Maintenance will be heightened over the course of time with increased folding and the only way to really deal with this is to manage your folding of the shades down to as little as possible.
Final Thoughts
Solar shades are definitely the environmental option in the world of shades. Not only do they save you ridiculous amounts of energy costs, but they are also made of green materials that will allow you to harness the power of the sun without being overly wasteful in the process. This does come with certain drawbacks, but the eco-friendly designer should definitely choose solar shades over any other product currently available within the marketplace.
