Too Hot In Your House? Tutorial for Indoor Window Shades to Keep out the Summer Heat and Light

It gets so hot here in South Texas and we have to get creative to keep cool. We have a new AC unit that cost almost as much as our car and it’s worth every penny, but we still try to keep our electric bills down as much as possible and run the AC less. 

One of the ways we lose so much of the cool air in our house is through our super thin windows. We still have the original windows from the 1970s… single pane, paper thin… 

One of the first things we did to the windows was buy some UV film. 

It took FOREVER to get it done, but it did help significantly.

It’s still up there 6 years later. 

We also had a ton of insulation added to our attic when they were installing the new AC unit. That helped significantly too. 

We’ve also put up some outdoor window shades on some of the windows to keep the sun from even hitting the glass while letting ambient light in.

One of the best ideas I had though was to put a car windshield sunshade on our east and west windows. (Like this one:)
I figured, if it works to keep my car cool, it should work to keep my house cool too.

It absolutely does. I fit the shade into the window and attach it using a tension rod. It keeps the hot sun out where it belongs and keeps my house nice and cool. I am very impressed with how well it works. The curtain rod holds the window shade into the window without using tape, etc.

It also doubles as a nice room darkening shade. Using the tension rod makes it easy to take down on the days where it's not hot and you want sunlight or open windows. Plus this way, you don’t have to tape or pin/nail/whatever it into your window frames. The one year I taped them in there, we ended up with all sorts of melted adhesive all over the place it it took hours to scrape it all off. NEVER AGAIN! 

The east windows really benefit from this because our bedrooms are on the east side of the house. Since they double as a room darkening shade, it keeps it dark after the sun comes up, which helps my boys and me stay asleep a little longer in the morning. I have no intention of waking up when the sun comes up, and I can’t sleep in a light environment. I need my sleep. The morning sun is pretty hot, and this keeps the rooms from heating up immediately upon sunrise. 

The west windows also really benefit because the afternoon sun is unbearably hot. Our living room is on the west side of the house and it heats up quickly. Some days, it would get too hot to sit there. The thermostat is on the east side of the house so it wasn’t registering the warmer temperature in the living room. The west side of the house would get 5-8 degrees warmer as the sun beat down on the windows! I didn’t want to lower the thermostat any further, so we got a window AC unit for just that room. That seemed to help a lot, but it cost money to run the electricity for it, and Froot Loop played with it constantly. Just keeping the sun OFF the windows really made a difference. 

This method doesn’t work very well for any windows not receiving direct sunlight because the whole point is to eliminate the Greenhouse effect of the sun’s rays hitting the window and entering the house. The highly reflective surface of the shade increases the albedo of the window, making more of the sun’s rays bounce off the house and back to the outside. The thicker sun shades did work to insulate the other windows (perhaps mimicking the insulating effect of a double pane window), and work well in the north and south bedroom windows as blackout shades but that was just a side benefit. 

I love this method because it is cheap and easy and effective. We don’t have to run our AC as much when we have these shades in the windows. We still use the other methods such as the outdoor roller shades. Plus, I made a cheap canopy for the back of the house using some old curtains and 2x4s (It looks pretty ridiculous but no one can see it but us so I don’t really care… it works) so we can still get ambient sunlight in those windows so it’s not like a dungeon in here. 

Overall, I’m very happy with this method. Let me know if you try it! 

What methods do you use to keep the house cool in the summer?