When you think of a sustainable home, you might picture one filled with energy-saving light bulbs or a roof covered in solar panels. Putting these things to use in your home is a great way to live an eco-friendly lifestyle, of course. But did you know that your window treatments can help the environment too?
At Drapery Street, we offer energy-efficient, responsibly manufactured, sustainable window treatments that are right for your home and the planet.
Inherently Energy Efficient
A home can lose up to half of its heating and cooling through its windows. That equates to lost money and wasted energy, especially when you’re adjusting your thermostat to the extremes to compensate. The right window treatments can improve your home’s energy efficiency by retaining heat in the winter and keeping air cool in the summer.
There’s no need to hurry home from work to close the blinds every time the weather changes. With Hunter Douglas PowerView® automated shades, your home can manage it for you!
Our Drapery Street installation experts can integrate your automated window treatments with smart home systems. When paired with a Nest thermostat, your smart home system can even raise and lower your shades at the best times to maximize energy efficiency.
Hunter Douglas window treatments are designed to let just the right amount of sunshine into your home. Certain shades, like Silhouette shadings, can help reduce energy consumption through a process called “daylighting.” This process draws natural light into a room and reduces the need for artificial lights and thereby reducing energy use.
At the same time, window treatments can block UV light which causes rooms to heat up in summer months. There’s no need to crank up the A/C if you have UV-blocking shades. UV light also damages furnishings and even breaks down paint and sealant and bleaches wood, so it’s important to block it from entering your home.
UV light can do more harm than simply bleaching furniture, though. Some products release chemicals into the air when subjected to the sun day after day. The Hunter Douglas products we carry are GREENGUARD certified, meaning they’ve undergone rigorous testing to ensure they won’t have a detrimental effect on the air quality in your home. You can breathe easy knowing each of our products meets the strict GREENGUARD standards for low indoor chemical emissions.
Crafting Sustainable Window Treatments
Window treatments, by design, can help your home become more eco-friendly. But not all window treatments are created equal.
At Drapery Street, our sustainable window treatment selections include ones manufactured from plastic salvaged from the environment. This GreenScreen® Sea-Tex™ screen shade fabric from Hunter Douglas is made with yarn spun out of recovered coastal and marine plastic. Current estimates suggest that over 9 million tons of plastic refuse enters our oceans every year, where it endangers marine life. The health of our planet is tied directly to its oceans — and that means our own health is, too. So far, Sea-Tex™ fabric has enabled Hunter Douglas to remove 30 tons of plastic from the seas. And they’re just getting started!
If shades don’t suit your style, you can still get sustainable window treatments with Parkland® wood blinds. Available in a variety of styles, the wood used to create these blinds is harvested from responsibly managed forests. And what you take from those forests is given back: with each blind purchased, Hunter Douglas makes a donation to the Arbor Day Foundation to support rainforest preservation. Your new Parkland blinds won’t just beautify your home – they’ll help keep our world a beautiful place.
No matter which you choose, you can do your part to reduce waste by using the new rechargeable battery wand to control your PowerView® automated shades. Standard batteries, like AA and AAA sizes, contain harmful chemicals but are designed to be thrown away. Our rechargeable wands keep more batteries out of landfills by eliminating the need to replace them.
The battery charge lasts up to one year, depending on shade use. The PowerView® app will notify you when a recharge is needed, and on which shade. And because you won’t have to scavenge for batteries when they die, you’ll find these wands more convenient too!
How Will You Help the Planet?
At Drapery Street, we’re embracing sustainability — and we want to make it easy for you to do so, too. Our sustainable window treatments can add style, comfort, and functionality to your home, but they also give you the opportunity to give back to the Earth. Boosting your home’s energy efficiency helps save power while eco-friendly materials create beautiful window treatments that you can feel good about buying.
Learn more about Drapery Street’s sustainable window treatments: get started with a complimentary design consultation and let us help you find the right environmentally-friendly option for your home!
