Windows and You

So your house probably isn’t just some seamless block with a roof over it. There’s probably a few seams in there and a few openings, ways in and out of the house. Your door is probably the main one but there are probably others as well. A back door maybe and some windows as well.

Now, if your trying to be more energy efficient your doors and windows are going to pay a significant part of your overall energy usage. Insulation plays a huge role in being energy efficient, but doors and windows present points wherein that insulation can fail because they are actual, physical breaks in the wall.

So how do you solve that problem? How do you make it so that your windows aren’t liabilities in your journey of hitting net zero energy consumption?

Install awnings

Unless your windows are tinted, they’re going to let in a lot of heat. That’s the thing about clear glass, it doesn’t do a lot to stop heat from entering a room. So what do you do about that? How do you make it so that your windows don’t let heat in so that the room it’s facing into doesn’t get hot?

It’s fairly simple, you install awnings. Having awnings over the windows can block out most of the solar radiation that would otherwise seep into the house. The awnings are an energy efficient way to keep heat out so that it doesn’t raise the temperature of the room it faces into.

Double paned windows

Clear glass doesn’t keep out a lot of heat. That’s the problem with being completely transparent. Pretty much everything gets through and that includes solar radiation which then heats up whatever room the window faces into. Which means that the people in that room may start to feel somewhat warm and stuffy.

This leads them to turning on the air-con, which uses quite a lot of energy. Now, you don’t have to use that energy. Or you wouldn’t have to if it weren’t for all the heat that keeps coming into the room from the outside. But there’s no way to deal with that, is there? Not unless you had the power to change the weather.

Or if you had double paned windows. What are they? Simply put, they’re windows made from two panes of glass and with an inert gas like argon or krypton in between. This neutralizes the heat that would’ve otherwise crept into the house so the people in that house don’t have to turn on the air-con. So that’s a great way to save energy.

If you really want to keep heat out, then you can get triple paned windows, which are like double paned windows except that there’s a third pane of glass and a second gap filled with argon or krypton to be even more effective at keeping heat out.

Curtains or blinds

Another way to keep heat out of the house and one that doesn’t need you to replace them outright is to simply close the curtains. If you don’t already have curtains or blinds on that window, then you need to install some and then close them because blocking out the windows is a pretty cost-effective way of blocking the heat from coming in.

So close the curtains more often if you want to keep the heat out.

Up high and open

Okay, so you know quite a few ways to keep the heat out. But what if the heat gets in anyway and you need some way to let it out? Well, that’s where your windows come in handy. Here’s the thing about heat – it rises. Which means that if it gets into a room, the best place to let it out is up high.

So if you can have windows up high, open them up and any heat that creeps into the room will have a way out of the room.

There’s a lot of things you can do to make your house more energy efficient, a lot of things that you can to make it so that you don’t need to use as much energy in order to stay comfortable. One of those ways in the parts of the home.

Windows serve a lot of uses. They let air in and they let air out. They provide ventilation without needing to use any kind of electrical energy. But windows also let in a lot of things, like heat. Now, if you want to learn more about windows that can keep heat out, then contact Net Zero Plus today.