One of the best ways to brighten up a dark room is a well-placed skylight or two. Skylights are fantastic for adding natural light to a home, but they are also one of the biggest sources for excessive heat buildup in a home. That where skylight blinds can help.
Skylights are windows in the roof of your home and make a great addition to high ceilinged roof or sloped roof. These windows help you to add natural light to any room which is a wonderful thing. However, they can also easily allow too much heat and light into the home.
This is due to the fact that they are placed on the roof, usually directly facing the sun. This location and angle allows the sun’s heating rays to directly enter the home, usually for most of the daylight hours. Interior blinds are helpful at reducing the excessive light that enters, but they do little to stop heat. As with any shade or blind to be effective, they must be installed on the outside of the skylight or window.
The trick is to stop the heat while still allowing lots of ambient light to enter. After all, extra light is why you have a skylight in the first place. To help with this, there are various window blinds you can consider to give you control over the amount of light and heat in your room.
The most common, and probably most useful overall, are cellular skylight window shades. Cellular shades provide insulation so they will help maintain even temperatures in your home, thus lowering heating and cooling bills. And, cellular shades come in different opacities (light-filtering options), generally from semi-opaque to opaque. Semi-opaque provides gentle light-filtering, while opaque blocks light completely (blackout).
Cellular shades are constructed with honeycomb-shaped air cells that give cellular shades their superior insulation. Normally, you can choose single cell or double cell. The more cells, the more insulation. This is important because skylights, while adding natural light into your room, are usually a significant source of solar heat gain, or heat loss.
The argument for cellular shades as skylight shades is that if you are going to go through the relative hassle of putting up a window treatment for what is generally a hard to reach window it should probably serve more than one purpose. Cellular shades fit that bill. They are attractive with their crisp pleats, come in a wide selection of colors, come in different light filtering options and provide insulation.