Finding Warmth in Unexpected Places

No matter how or how often you heat your home during the winter months (on a rare chilly night or around the clock) you're probably looking for ways to keep your heating costs down. If you haven't already, be sure to read our article House-Warming Know-How, which offers tips for helping you to weatherize your home and save on heating bills.

Aside from some of the well-known weather-proofing steps we outline in that article (seal up holes, weather-strip doors, insulate attic floors), you can also improve your home's insulation by covering your windows with highly energy efficient window treatments. Because heat naturally moves toward cold surfaces, such as glass windows in the winter, experts calculate that almost 40 percent of all heat inside a home unnecessarily escapes this way. Our honeycomb shades are among our most energy efficient treatments. As we've mentioned here before, the cells actually trap cold air, decreasing the intensity of the temperature as it enters the room. These treatments can translate into significant utility bill savings, especially if your windows are on a cold northern exposure in the winter.

Duette® honeycomb shades were the industry's first highly energy efficient window coverings, developed in 1985 in response to the energy crisis of the late 1970s. This year, we've introduced the latest generation of honeycomb shade, Duette® Architella™. These window coverings, now available at select Hunter Douglas dealers, offer even greater energy efficiency thanks to their patented honeycomb-within-a-honeycomb construction. The unique design feature—an inner layer of fabric—creates three distinct air pockets within the shade, trapping more air and increasing the shades' R-value. R-value, by the way, is a measurement of a product's ability to resist heat flow; the higher the number, the better the insulation. A product with an R-value of 4.00 stops about 75 percent of heat loss through the window. Duette Architella boasts R-values of up to 7.73.

All Hunter Douglas products offer some measure of energy efficiency. As you browse our selection online, you'll see energy efficiency information for each product inside the Our Products section. Specifically, you'll see associated with each product a rating of Good, Excellent or Superior, which is based on the covering's ability to resist heat loss with a single layer of uncovered window glass as the baseline comparison. The degree to which an individual product will meet your energy efficiency needs will depend on the fabrics and product features you choose and whether your window coverings remain opened, closed, raised or lowered. If you're looking for superior energy efficiency performers, we recommend you start by learning more about our honeycomb shades, including Applause® honeycomb shades and—our biggest innovation in the honeycomb shade since we invented it—Duette Architella.


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