Are You Taking Advantage of Daylighting in Your Home?

When you imagine lighting control, you're probably picturing switches, dimmers, and timers. But lighting control shouldn't just take your artificial light into account. There are a variety of reasons it's essential to harness natural light in your San Antonio or Texas Hill Country home. And no technology helps with this task more than motorized shades. In this blog, we're going to explain the benefits of daylighting—embracing natural light—and show you how motorized shades play a significant role.

SEE MORE: How to Choose the Right Motorized Shades for Your Home

The Benefits of Daylighting

Daylighting is optimizing the use of natural light in a commercial or residential space. While reducing energy costs is the most direct benefit, natural light also improves productivity, comfort, mental health, and sleep cycles.

One of the most significant benefits of natural lighting is that it helps to regulate your circadian rhythm, making you feel more refreshed in the morning and relaxed in the evening. Having the right access to natural light also wards off depression associated with darker days in the winter or storm season.

Sunlight also serves a vital role in climate control. In the winter, it's an ideal way to keep your house warm without raking up huge energy bills.

How Motorized Shades Help

Many architects take daylighting into account when choosing window placement and size. For example, south-facing windows generate a lot of sunlight in the winter to alleviate heating costs. North facing windows usually attract a lot of indirect light that won’t result in glare in the morning or evenings. But physical limitations and the dynamic nature of natural light often means additional help is needed in the form of motorized shades.

Schedules: You can have shades automatically open in the morning to bring in natural light that encourages wakefulness and focus. Adjust your plans each season. Windows that were useful in heating up the home in winter could turn it into a sauna in the summer, so be proactive and bring down shades automatically in the hottest times of the day.

Shading Types: Make sure you use the right shade for each location without worrying about how easy it will be to control. Incorporate blackout shades in media rooms and bedrooms and Venetian blinds in kitchens. By turning blinds up, you turn direct sunlight into ambient lighting and reduce the heat gain in the house without ending up in a dark room without a view.

Intuitive Control: Daylighting should always be adaptable to your personal preferences. In media room or bedroom settings, for example, daylight is useful throughout the day. But there are situations when you may want to block it out entirely: to watch a movie, take a nap, sleep in late. In that case, it should be easy to bring down your shades via mobile apps, remotes, or wall switches.

Daylight Harvesting: Whether it's summer and you don't want additional heat or you’re in a home theater where ambient lighting is a detriment, you can use specific tools to ward off direct sunlight. Link your motorized shades to photosensors that tell them to close when hit directly.

 

Do you want to learn more about daylighting and how our home lighting control and motorized shades solutions help? You can reach out to us by calling (210) 858-6954, filling out our online contact form or chatting with a live representative on the bottom right.