How would you like to improve the comfort of your home all year round?
With carefully considered external shading, you can do a lot to not only enhance outdoor areas, but improve the energy efficiency of your home.
Design of external wall and window shading requires careful consideration of orientation and sun studies to make sure that it performs to improve energy efficiency.
The reason for this is that you have to achieve a dual purpose.
In summer, you want to shade the windows and walls from direct summer sun to reduce the amount of heat transferred into your home.
On the other hand, in winter you want to get as much sun as you can on your windows and walls to help them warm the inside of your home, saving you on energy or fuel costs for heating.
Luckily we get a bit of help from mother nature with this. We all notice how the days are shorter in winter than summer.
The reason for this is to do with the angle of the sun, it’s essentially lower in winter, which means it takes a shorter arc through the sky, making for shorter days.
This allows the sun to sneak under any constructed shading, as shown below.
So what are our 4 tips for making sure you have adequate shading in your new home design?
- Ensure that a sun study is conducted to confirm that shading runs past the edges of the windows to sufficiently cover them from summer sun
- Ensure that your budget includes internal blinds or curtains to all of your windows
- Insist on your landscaping plan being considered as part of the overall design particularly to the East and Western facades, and where tree choices are involved (you can see more on this in our guide, which can be accessed below)
- Ensure that outdoor areas being used to assist with shading, contain open sides so that they ventilate well to prevent radiant heat building up which will pass into the house
These few tips really only scrape the surface of what can be done to adequately shade your home.
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