I just want to share that these are by far the best home automation you can have. I love my smart lights, hacked together smart humidifier, smart fans (the vornado dc fans with outlet switches), intake air pump, and air quality monitoring.
But nothing has the quality of life impact of smart blinds. It’s the best, and probably only, way to reliably keep your sleep schedule in sync. Smart lightbulbs - four of the brightest you can buy - are nothing compared to a window on a cloudy day.
Automated blinds can also have a good effect on temperature control. In the summer you can have your south facing blinds automatically close when you leave the house to block out the sun.
I have that, but for my entire house - in the Summer the walls get covered with sun blocking plates, and in the winter the walls are exposed to the rays of the sun.
If you want your own, you can buy it, it's called: Parthenocissus tricuspidata or you can get the Parthenocissus quinquefolia.
The kind with piercing tendrils does, but the species I listed have glue pads that cause no harm.
You do need to manage windows and gutters. What you do is pull the vine of off the border of the window and leave it dangling in the air (a little bit of it). This signals to the vine that it reached the end of what it's sitting on, and it will stop growing there. (If you cut it instead, it thinks it has an opportunity.)
Does it not create humidity issues? I always liked that look but I live in Belgium where it can be way too rainy in spring/autumn and i'd assume there'd be leaves then.
No humidity issues, the leaves have lots of space between them - they arrange themselves to catch every bit of sun as seen in 2D from a distance, but up close some stick out farther, some are closer, and there's plenty of air flow.
So that's a funny thing, your blinds are on the inside of your house so the sun energy is hitting them and dissipating from there. Hopefully your blinds are white and reflecting more of it out than the other surfaces it would otherwise hit. But if you want to make a real temperature difference you need blinds on the other side of the insulated box otherwise known as an awning.
You can 100% achieve a real temperature difference with unpainted wooden internal blinds. I'm sure you can achieve much more with an ideal setup but just sharing from experience, what OP has can easily make a difference of several degrees.
can you please elaborate on this? logic dictates that if you cover the whole thing with plastic (paint) it will affect the performance of the material (I assume reflecting light (paint) vs absorbing light (raw wood).
I feel like we design houses like we design cars and many other modern things, form over function and fix the problems by adding a ton of overcomplicated technologies.
You've never been in a room during the day with the rolladen all the way down. It's pitch black. It's pretty great. The good ones that separate slowly when rising also let you infinitely adjust the level of light and outside air that comes in.
Rolladen are superior because they can actually block 99.999999% of light when you want to watch a movie during a bright summer day or want to adjust your sleep schedule before travel.
The only tricky part being that it's desirable to limit the amount of sun shining into the house in the warmer months, but not the cooler ones. Awnings that fold or are otherwise removable are a reasonable solution, there are also sunshades which mount outside, and also use a spinning rod to raise and lower (if the electronics and motor here could be weatherproofed a little they might be quite usable).
Having the blind close to the window and covering at least a extra 6 inches or 15 cm band around edge of window significantly reduces light spillage into the room, when the blind is down, in my experience.
Indeed. Our 100 year old house has exactly the right-sized roof overhangs to shade to the bottom of the upper floor windows for the peak sun periods in the summer while still letting much of the winter sun in.
Then, for the lower floor we accomplish a similar effect with tall, deciduous plantings.
There's a whole science of how natural sunlight differs from leds (and its biological effect) and how to recreate it. I believe SAD lights try to replicate sunlight, but generally modern LEDs, even "warm" ones are missing key wavelengths and have a different profile from sun/sky light. There are now LEDs much closer to real sunlight, but they are also more expensive (though arguable not more so than knocking out more windows.
What I'm surprised at is how rare fake windows/skylights are. I mean, such products/companies exist, but they seem to be relatively niche, and accordingly expensive (as in "call our sales team for pricing" expensive), not really ready for your usual DIY/domestic consumer.
I think what we really need is monitor/TV companies producing low-res, high lumen screens for this purpose, hopefully mass produced. I think Sony has produced a "passive" screen ("the Frame") , that is effectively a matt tv mean to display slow/static images to replace hanging pictures (and even stuffs the electronics in the wall to keep a low profile), but it's still a luxury niche.
There's just something about waking up to actual sunlight (even filtered through clouds) that no amount of artificial brightness can replicate. It's like your brain knows the difference.
Indoor lighting is about two orders of magnitude dimmer, you’d need 1kW/m*2 (100W/sqft) to emulate a cloudless day at noon, so 20kW just to light up your living room, not accounting for LED losses.
The blinds shown under this article are pretty ordinary vinyl type blinds that leak a ton of light. I wish I could find blinds thick enough to behave like cardboard over windows, that could also be opened on a daily cadence.
At this point I gave up on blinds and put a shirt over my eyes to sleep. I thought about just covering the windows permanently but I don't relish that idea.
Get a sleep mask. They're opaque, so they block more light, and they don't cover your nose or mouth. Contoured sleep masks won't interfere with your eyelashes, helping reduce dry eye further.
It's a total blackout, though it definitely benefits from the window being deeply inset; on a typical bedroom window at midday I expect a bunch of light would find its way around that.
I got something similar (amazon yoolax blackout cellular honeycomb shades). They have extra help from L-shaped side panels blocking light along the sides.
Those are pretty slick, will check those Yoolax ones out, have manual versions from Ikea that work well for both temperature control and light control.
We just had blinds installed from ublockout.com (hope it's not against the rules to link this - I have zero affiliation with them other than being a recent customer). The price was reasonable and they do the job. By far the biggest sources of light in my bedroom now are leakage under doors and various small LEDs (not enough to bother me, but of course there are ways to tackle that too).
I don't really understand having trouble with light when you sleep. Personally if I'm tired I happily sleep on summer noon with window opened. Just not in direct sunlight to avoid sunburn. And it's super pleasant experience for me. Better than regular sleep in the darkness at night.
Yeah this must be something that varies based on the person- I have some amazing sleep during daytime naps with sunlight streaming in. Consequently, I totally don't understand the fixation on blind openers, but I get that other people have different needs.
Not sure what country you're from, but "blockout blinds" are likely what you're looking for. They blockout (essentially) all light and are operated like normal blinds.
Have never seen blockout blinds which stop enough light during the day - they leak enough to be comparable to a reading lamp, since outdoors is so bright.
I used to work night shift and tried a few different things. Maybe the super-premium blinds block more light, but IME the most effective solution is blackout curtains. You'll need to hang a curtain rod that's wider than the window and get curtains that are wide enough, ideally just a single curtain rather than 2 if your window is narrow enough.
Mounted internal to the window frame, not external, works better for me. Internal can ride tighter to the window, so light can't go out the edges. With external frame mounting, you need much wider shades.
If the fabric itself isn't blocking light... You need better material. I have only ever had problem with light leakage in the edges, not in the fabric material.
I believe 'blackout thermal shades' is what to look for.
I have that. They have a magnet that keep the middle, where they connect light-tight.
Installation is key - they need to be oversized, covering the entire window AND the trim, and they need to be carefully installed so that they touch the trim.
I do this at airbnbs when I'm traveling, particularly in the summer in Europe. The number of bedrooms I've been in with only gauzy curtains that get full morning sun is mind boggling. Hat tip to The Martian for turning me on to the trick.
The Wirecutter Reviews folks regularly look at sleep masks and I've used a few that they recommend though I can say from experience ones that have velcro straps on the back as opposed to being fitted to your head can be problematic from a comfort point of view if you normally sleep on your back.
I use the Nidra ones primarily as I can blink without my eyelashes catching the mask
Another wrap around option with audio are the SleepPhones, while not designed to go over your eyes they work well that way and before switching to the Nidra and A20 ear buds that was my primary headset for about a decade.
Notwithstanding the above, blackout blinds are awesome as long as they extend above and below and past the sides of the window frame. Can be quite low cost from places like Costco.
The tiniest amount of light will keep me from sleeping. Seriously. A neighbor can turn their lights on across the valley and if I have line of sight through a window, it’s over. I tried lots of things, and at long last, I found this mask that I absolutely swear by https://a.co/d/cDbUv9J
I lost it once, and bought two more, so that I would never be without one again. It’s the only sleep mask that works. It stays on all night. It does not leak light around the edges. Everything “shaped like your eyes” is a complete waste of time. This is the correct implementation of sleep mask, and I will never go back.
It’s super comfortable, and even slightly muffles noise since it wraps around your entire head. I do like the effect of good sealing ear plugs (Mack’s 31 Db only), but find them extremely uncomfortable to wear multiple days in a row. I’ll bring the Mack’s on vacation, just in case I am put next to an obnoxious snorer, there is very loud city noise all night, etc.
I don’t have issues sleeping in too late, because I actually get sleep with this thing, and after some time, I was just back on a normal rhythm, very consistently waking up at the same time.
I care deeply about sleep mask. Maybe it won’t work for everyone, but just in case it can help a single person, I am unloading my mask manifesto.
bonus: they can make a space look homey instead of like an office!
I’d recommend a double rod, a blackout curtain on the rod closest to the window, and a “pretty” curtain on the outer rod. Gives you best of both worlds. Functional and pleasing, like at a hotel.
Can't speak for OP, but just get Home Assistant running and play around. It'll work in Docker in anything, but it's a good use for an old Raspberry Pi. There isn't much more of a stack than that, and HA is by far the most polished OSS solution.
It's got some sharp edges - every time I've done a major auto-update it's broken something critical. You can run it alongside other controllers like the Hue Bridge, which is nice to have as a backup (since 90% of what most people connect is smart lighting). Probably the most useful simple automation I have is an motion activated dim light in the bathroom at night, but that's using Hue.
Then look at ESPHome, which is an ecosystem for making your own DIY sensors and controllers that can feed into HA. For example we have a Sensirion air quality sensor that triggers a smart switch connected to a fan if the particulate level gets high when cooking. You can go a very long way with on/off to control non-smart devices, and your sensors don't need to be particularly accurate (like absolute PM2.5) as long as the conditon you trigger on is repeatable.
The only thing to think about is what hardware ecosystem makes sense for you. For example there's at least four different competing standards for connectivity (WiFi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter/Thread, etc). So getting a Zigbee dongle isn't a bad idea because then you can connect any IKEA or Hue device (among others).
Home Assistant is nice for this crowd in that you can actually use a real programming language to do the automations. I went with PyScript but NodeRed is very popular as well. No need for YAML
Can you? I should give it another try. I remember giving it a look a few years ago and it looked like a considerable amount of the setup was going to take place through a web GUI and then be persisted in its internal database. For a server I have to maintain over time, I'd rather things be as stateless as possible so that the cost of doing a scripted redeploy is basically zero.
PyScript runs inside HA and IIRC the Python in it has some quirks because of it.
AppDaemon[0] runs alongside it and is more "real" Python, it mostly just responds to events sent to it.
NodeRED has a direct integration and is (in my experience) best for complex state machines as you can easily debug them and actually see the logic work.
They also have a REST API to trigger things and a Websocket API if you need more real-time stuff (subscribing to events instead of querying states)
Then there is just straight up MQTT, where you need to do it all yourself.
What HA shines is that it tends to have ready-made community integrations with _everything_. And enough users for each that if something breaks, people will notice and it'll be fixed promptly.
If over 100 ug/m3 for 2 minutes, turn on, if under 10 for 10, turn off. If someone's cooking, there is a very predictable spike that peaks in the low hundreds and then decays (super-) exponentially. It was surprising to see how long it takes to get back to ambient. I think you'd have to cook a steak with the stove extractor off to hit 1000 and our hard-wired smoke alarm would definitely be going off. I have no idea how absolutely accurate the SEN55 is, but the background level is usually below 5. I don't live in a particularly polluted place, so that seems reasonable. NOx is almost always zero.
The home assistant $100 stand alone device. Pretty seamless user experience. On par with what you would expect for a consumer device as far as UX. Maybe could be a bit more polished but you can do pretty much anything with it as far extending the ecosystem. My only complaint is that writing automations in untyped yaml sucks. Fortunately, if you dump the docs in an LLM it can one shot most things - if you’re trying to do something the gui automation tool doesn’t support.
The rest is zigbee and zwave switches and sensors. You can get cheap ones from ikea. You can get nicer ones from Zooz. I like Apollo for air quality sensors. The humidifier is the German brand Ventura. Zero maintenance. But it’s not smart so I got a power outlet that reports power usage. When it runs out of water the humidifier shuts off and the power goes to zero, so I have an automation that detects that and sends a message via the HA app.
Living in California and having fans move air around from cool rooms to warmer rooms has cut our AC bill significantly as a dc fan is a fraction of power consumption of a whole house AC. And also co2 levels stay much lower. Last week I set up my window fan to blow air in whenever it’s cooler outside then inside.
>> But nothing has the quality of life impact of smart blinds <<
I have a ton of sleep problems and just wanna push back here a little... going for a brisk walk in the fresh air and sunshine every day works a lot better for me.
Ya, it’s especially nice if you have a lot of windows and want to open or close them all at once. Lutron blinds were the first improvement we made to the house and was a no brainer even at the highish price we paid.
But nothing has the quality of life impact of smart blinds. It’s the best, and probably only, way to reliably keep your sleep schedule in sync. Smart lightbulbs - four of the brightest you can buy - are nothing compared to a window on a cloudy day.