Closing your window blinds on hot summer days blocks the sunlight to keep your home cooler and reduce your energy use. Closing them on cold winter nights cuts down on heat loss, so your home stays warmer with less strain on your furnace.
Sunshine streams in through the window, and the gap in between the window and blinds captures the heat, producing a greenhouse effect. In the winter, this is a desirable effect, and in the summer, when you want it to be cooler in your home, all you have to do is raise the blinds to leave the window uncovered.
Window blinds—vertical (Venetian blinds) or horizontal slat-type (louvered-type)—are effective at reducing summer heat gain and reducing glare, while providing good daylight indoors.
The clever use of blinds, curtains, and other window treatments can help keep your house cool and your bills in check. The Department of Energy says the smart management of window coverings can reduce heat gain by up to 77 percent. (And, as a bonus, these same practices can reduce heat loss in the winter.)
Insulated Cellular Shades
For leaky windows, insulated cellular shades, sometimes called honeycomb shades, are one of the two most effective window treatments for keeping out the cold air and keeping in the heat.
Tip. Closing your window blinds on hot summer days blocks the sunlight to keep your home cooler and reduce your energy use. Closing them on cold winter nights cuts down on heat loss, so your home stays warmer with less strain on your furnace.
When blinds are closed with the slats turned up and the rounded side facing out, the heat is directed towards the ceiling, which helps keep the room cooler. This is the ideal position for blinds in the hotter months.
The honest answer is all window blinds will help keep the cold out, if you use them properly. It is very simple, close your blinds in the early evening and leave them closed until the morning. This will keep as much heat inside your home as possible.
The View From Outside During The Day
From outside they do offer privacy due to the fact that the light outside is much brighter than the light inside. As you can see from the picture the person in the room can not be seen. However you can notice the items on the sill due to their close proximity to the blind.
This means that when it comes to the solid fabric of the blind itself, you cannot see through blackout blinds from outside at night, or during the day for that matter either. Blackout blinds then do provide privacy at night, and won't let either light in or out, nor the sight of things best kept private.
Vertical Blinds
Vertical blinds are great at not only keeping the heat out of your home, but they also are efficient when it comes to light control and privacy. They come in different colors and patterns, and they can effectively reduce both the heat and the glare going through the slats.
Drapes, curtains and blinds enable you to control the amount of sunlight that enters the room. If you keep them closed completely, you can block the light and heat coming from the sun. You might want to consider window treatments with a light-colored or reflective backing as they are known to work best.
Cooling Plants
Some popular indoor plants can act as natural coolants, offering a more natural way to lower the temperature in your home and reduce your reliance on cooling appliances that cause energy bills to spike.
Fans. Whether you go for a table model, a pedestal-mounted fan or a fan that is suspended from the ceiling, the (good old) fan is an efficient cooler and a simple alternative to an air conditioning unit.
You might also consider fans, evaporative coolers, or heat pumps as your primary means of cooling. In addition, a combination of proper insulation, energy-efficient windows and doors, daylighting, shading, and ventilation will usually keep homes cool with a low amount of energy use in all but the hottest climates.
Small holes and cracks let hot air into your home just like they let cold air in during the winter. These holes can be in windows, around pipes, light fixtures, anywhere there's a connection of materials or something entering or exiting your house. Fix small leaks with caulk and use a foam sealant to fix larger gaps.
A natural way to enhance the quality of air and keeping our homes cooler in summers is to go for indoor plants. Plants can keep your house cool because they lose water during transpiration, which cools the air around the plants, leaving it purified and fresh. Plants absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen.
Plants cool by the process of “transpiration”, releasing moisture into the air. A USDA estimate is that proper use of plants could decrease air temperature in an office by as much as ten degrees. That's it.
Thermogenic plants are plants that are able to emit the heat in order to elevate temperature of surrounding air around the relevant parts or the cavities of the plant. Major portion of such plants belongs to the family of Araceae. Almost all thermogenic plants are larger than typical herbaceous plants.