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How To Use Your Window Treatments To Make Your Home More Energy Efficient

Keeping your home comfortable during summer and winter can be a challenge, especially with the rising costs of energy to power your home's heater and air conditioner. With the use of window treatments and window blinds, you can help keep your home more comfortable during each season's extreme temperature variations. Here are some tips to help you accomplish this.

Summer Window Tips

Your home's windows provide you with sunlight during the day and a beautiful outside view, but can also allow solar heat gain to enter your home and heat it up. Blocking out the sun's rays during the day can prevent this solar heat gain and help keep your home's internal temperature more comfortable and allow your air conditioner to not work as hard, which saves on your energy bill.

If you live in a climate that has cooler summer nights, open your windows at night, and place window fans in one or two windows in your home to draw the outside cool air to cool your home. Then, in the morning when the sun rises, keep your window blinds closed on the eastern, southern, and western-facing windows against the sun's rays as the sun rotates through the sky during the day. 

If your home does not have window blinds, you can easily install and hang curtain rods and widow curtains to block out sunshine. It is helpful to install curtains that have a light-colored or white lining, which will reflect the sun's rays back outside. A darker curtain lining should be avoided, as it will absorb the sun's heat and radiate it into the interior of your home.

Winter Window Tips

During the winter, the opposite is true and you want the sun's rays to shine into your home's windows. This helps you benefit from the solar heat gain to warm your home's interior. And during the winter, the sun will sit lower in the sky to more easily shine into your home, so open the blinds and curtains to let it in during these colder months.

At night, close your home's window blinds or curtains to help prevent cold outside the windows from traveling into your home. Installing blinds that are covered in fabric can help insulate your windows better than a single-layer metal or plastic window blind. And, curtains with a double layer of fabric are better for keeping cold drafts outside, as the two layers of fabric trap a layer of air between then to boost their insulation properties.

Use these two tips to help maintain the temperature in your home all year.

For more information, you will want to contact a company such as Sav-Mor Interiors.


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