Are you sensitive to sunlight? Or that street light right outside your window disrupts your night sleep? Then blackout shades can be your savior to create pitch-perfect darkness in the room during the daytime or for decent night sleep.
However, there are various factors you must consider before opting for blackout shades, such as types of blinds, opacity, fabric, etc.
It is a well-known fact that sleep is vital for good health. If you cannot get enough sleep or are unable to enjoy a deep enough sleep, it can have adverse effects on your abilities to function properly. Sooner or later, you start feeling the physical and psychological effects of sleep deprivation.
Feeling lethargic during the day, stressed and irritable, and a weakened immune system are some of the most common side effects of not getting enough sleep. Thus, you must ensure to create a calm, relaxing environment in your bedroom to enjoy a decent and deep night’s sleep.
Other Features to Accentuate Blackout Shades
Only selecting blackout shades is not important. You must also consider other features, such as if the material effectively blocks external noise, provides thermal insulation, etc. You can also opt for fabric or material that is water-resistant, making it a lot easier to clean.
This means, if you are shopping for blackout shades for children’s bedroom, you do not have to worry about sticky fingers. Water-resistant material will allow you to wipe them clean conveniently.
Blackout Shades Fabric: Room Temperature and Noise Reduction
The blackout shade fabric offers numerous additional benefits besides blocking out sun or street lights. They also offer thermal insulation to your room, which can have one of the following two effects:
- They will keep your room cooler and darker during the summer by blocking the penetration of heat from the sun.
- During winters, they will insulate your rooms and stop the indoor heat from escaping. Hence, it will help maintain your room temperature to a comfortable warmth level.
Both these benefits ensure that your room temperature stays at a comfortable level. The inadequate temperature can cause trouble sleeping. Being too cold or too hot is commonly associated with people struggling to nod off.
That said – do not mix blackout shades with room darkening shades. Even industry professionals end up mixing the two and use the terms interchangeably when, in reality, blackout shades and room darkening shades are two different entities altogether.
What are Room Darkening Shades?
There is definitely some confusion around room darkening shades; let us shed some light to resolve it. Room darkening shades usually refer to all window treatments aiming to reduce the level of light entering your room.
However, they do not make your rooms nearly as pitch black as blackout shades do. They simply make the room noticeably darker than it was.
Sheer shades, roller shades, and pleated shades are some of the common variants of room darkening shades. You can purchase all of these window treatment solutions with opaque fabric or materials to block as much light as possible from entering your room.
People even use room darkening shades in bedrooms or home theatre areas. Although, you can also use blackout shades for the areas mentioned above.
That said – here’s the difference in a nutshell between the two:
Blackout shades use special fabric with the ability to block 100 percent of incoming light. Whereas, room darkening shades can be almost any shades using a piece of fabric to block 95 to 99 percent of light entering into your room.
Anything less than 95 percent is a light-filtering shade. It is neither room darkening nor blackout shades.
All You Need to Know about Blackout Shades
When you install blackout shades, they will make your room completely dark. However, do not expect any shades to block out 100 percent light, which means it is impossible to achieve pitch-black darkness.
You will still be able to see some light filtering through the sides of the shades during the daytime. When you install blackout shades, be prepared for dim, ‘Halo’ of light around the edges of your room’s windows.
In order to create this kind of effect, blackout shades generally use opaque material like Mylar or PVC. These materials are perfect to fit tightly to your window’s casing, resulting in a drastic reduction of light seepage.
The rooms that are ideally suited to use blackout shades are:
- Bedroom
- Nursery
- Darkroom (if you are a professional photographer)
- Home theater
Some variants of blackout shades tend to cut out all light (well, almost), creating the darkest possible effect. These shades reduce the light seepage by obstructing that ‘halo’ we spoke about earlier. These shades include:
- Roller shades including side channels
- Blackout curtains including tracks
- Multi-layered windows treatment that combines either cornice box and side panels or valance
If the room you intend to make pitch-perfect dark gets direct sunlight, blackout shades are an adequate solution at your disposal.
Advantages of Blackout Shades
Beyond achieving absolute pitch-perfect darkness in a room, fully blocking the sunlight gives blackout shades additional distinctive benefits over their “room darkening” counterparts. Some of them are:
- Do you know UV rays from the sun can damage your home fittings and furnishings? These may include rugs, furniture, and other belonging. Using blackout shades provide 100 percent protection to these items. Thus, blackout shades are an ideal solution for media rooms, nurseries, and studios to store expensive and light-sensitive equipment.
- Blackout shades improve indoor temperature control. Using low e glass around your windows and sealing cracks can prevent excessive heat loss during the winter season. However, blackout shades can work as a secondary measure for insulation due to their thickness. This will prevent you from using the heating system for too long and contribute towards greater savings on your energy bills.
- With blackout shades, you do not need to use curtains and blinds with multiple layers. A single blackout shade with thick material will suffice to create the desired darkness.
- The opaqueness offers some level of privacy and security. If you have a room with a window on a street level, blackout shades can block the outsider’s view and prevent strangers and neighbors from peeking into your residence.
Conclusion
If you are a company or a homeowner looking to install blackout shades on your windows, contact the experts. They are market leaders, offering some of the most innovative designs for blackout shades.
