What are Smart Shades?

When looking back, window shades have gone from having to manually pull the cord and twist the stick to open and close your blinds to blinds that can be drawn with a touch of a button. Today, they’ve now evolved into smart shades you can incorporate into your home automation system.

What are Smart Shades?
Motorized smart blinds help you to control both heat loss and solar gain from your home naturally all day long simply by pre-programming times where they automatically open and close. With the help of smart home technology, smart shades actually use the sunlight and temperature to learn when to open and close and this maximizes your HVAC system’s efficiency.

Wireless smart shades work similar to smart LED bulbs where you are able to lower or raise them as a group or individually like the sunset or sunrise. Some smart blinds use either a remote control or a smart app, others use both.

Types of Smart Shades?
Typically, there are two categories that smart shade solutions fall under: retrofit devices and motorized shades. Retrofit devices shoot towards lower prices and normally operate on a simple app-connected motor you feed the strings of certain blinds into which makes them “smart.” These gadgets, however, require continuous loop chain blinds which can be expensive to buy online and hard to find in stores.

Motorized shades are a little more expensive and come with a hub. However, they’re also reliable, self-contained and tend to cooperate better with other smart home technology.

Benefits of Smart Shades?
There are a number of benefits of having smart blinds in your home including:

Convenience: Open and close motorized smart shades with a simple touch of a button, an app on your smartphone or a remote control
Energy Savings: Connect your motorized shades to a smart home hub to reduce how much energy your HVAC system uses
Cost savings: Save money as a homeowner. These shades sense sunny days in the month of January and open up to capture the sunlight heat inside your home and help to reduce your heating bill. Additionally, you can program them to block out the sun during the summer months or open part way on a cloudy day
Smart Home Integration: Use smart thermostats with a collection of data to decide whether the smart shades should open or close to conserve energy
Protect Your Valuables: Protect your floors, furniture and valuable art from the sunlight’s damaging rays with motorized shades
Safety: Keep kids and pets safe with no cords

Now that you know the benefits of smart blinds, it’s also important to know there are other ways you can help with cooling costs as well such as installing a whole house fan. Both smart blinds and a whole house fan working together can really help you save a lot of money on your cooling costs