How to deal with house overheating/sun in face when dining?

[rh2205]

We have two issues due to oversight when we designed our house.

 

The most pressing one because we have a child who is starting to protest is that the dining table area gets very sunny in the morning, we have 6metre wide patio doors. The sun at the height of summer passes over by about 1pm so it could be worse. It would probably ruin it to put curtains up & top mounted recessed electric blinds would drop 4cm below the very thin outer window frame profiles & we have an extremely tall person in the house which would then catch their head on it when walking through the doors. On the outside we have some very pristine white external wall insulation & we are scared to mount anything externally plus I am not going to lie we really don’t want to be spending more than a few hundred pounds on the solution in an ideal world. 
 

Second issue is our house gets very hot… if I could go back we would of designed external blinds at the outset to combat this issue plus improve sleep quality as quite frankly this countries idea of ‘black out blinds’ are utterly useless. Do we just live with all our shortcomings for the next 20 years? Because it was a major refurb but not a full rebuild we have big windows with no consideration for overheating! I don’t see that we can easily retrofit external blinds now for various reasons without totally ruining all the external facade which to be honest worked out as somehow the best finish on the entire house (sorry we clearly put our money & thoughts in the totally wrong places being inexperienced & in a rush). Upstairs the window recess externally is only an about 50mm & we have all this lovely vertical concrete cladding to contend with for fitting anything upper floor.

 

I did see you can buy some pretty cheap external tarps that could be hooked up on the hottest days but that would still require some fixings into the insulation & all the faff that comes with putting it up only saving grace is we have a very tall person who doesn’t need a ladder. But there is also the day to day morning sun issue.  

Any & all ideas on a budget now welcome because I don’t like the idea of potentially spending £1000’s on stuff as in my mind all the expensive solutions literally ruin the appearance of the entire house either inside or out for the times in the day you are not using it! It’s £550 for instance just for one of those internal blackout blinds with ugly outer frame to fully blackout 1 window upstairs for instance, and there’s 2 windows in the master bedroom…

[JohnMo]

Internal blnds?

[rh2205]

Internal blinds would have to be fitted on the wall above the window recess otherwise will catch head on them when walking through the door so hardly an attractive position as the metal bracket/roll up dimension is lower than the current opening ( they usually run at about 7cm our frames are 3cm). If we don’t want cords due to width of door & needing approx 4 separate blinds we also have to pay out for electric ones at a cost of £900.

Edited April 3, 2023 by rh2205

[Bitpipe]

We specified external motorised venetian blinds on east and south windows (vertical windows and velux) but didn't address the west facing sliders. In summer, these can really lead to overheating and we tried voile curtains etc.

 

Then we discovered the battery powered wireless roller blinds from Ikea and they have been a godsend. By sheer fluke, three of their 1.2m blinds perfectly fit the slider recess and as they are battery & wireless they require minimal installation. Connecting them to the Ikea smart hub is a faff initially but they now work via remote, phone app or alexa voice command plus you can set programs (open on sunrise, close on sunset etc). They have a full and partially opaque options, various lengths and widths.  

[saveasteading]

13 minutes ago, Bitpipe said:

roller blinds from Ikea

Are these fitted tight so that the heat from the light that has come through stays between the glass and the blinds?

[ToughButterCup]

Adapt this to you window dimensions: DIY cost of concrete wood and a bit of effort £500

 

Grow any climbing / shading plant on it. 

[Alan Ambrose]

As an outside-the-box solution - any scope for some external planting nearish the windows? We have some olive and other trees near-ish the SW windows - these look good, make the view very 'green', we get entertained by the blue tits, and the trees screen the sun. I trim in the Autumn and we appreciate more light through the winter. 

[Bitpipe]

3 hours ago, saveasteading said:

Are these fitted tight so that the heat from the light that has come through stays between the glass and the blinds?

 

There's a few cm between the blind and glass but they are very effective at minimising the solar gain - only have had them up one summer so will see how they perform this year. 10mm gap between the blind material (we have 3 in a row) but this does not seem to be an issue.

[saveasteading]

1 minute ago, Bitpipe said:

minimising the solar gain

The solar energy has entered the room. Some gets reflected back from white blinds. Some conducts back out from the glass. The rest is in the room.

We know that curtains and blinds work, so is the rest of the benefit from keeping the window reveal hot and not spreading through the room?

Or is it mostly a time effect, keeping direct sun off the room and contents?

[Radian]

5 hours ago, rh2205 said:

we really don’t want to be spending more than a few hundred pounds on the solution in an ideal world

Reflective window foil? 

[saveasteading]

Reflective window foil placed by experts. Otherwise you will get ugly bubbles in it.

You can choose the tint, or no colour for uv only.