Comment by J_Shelby_J
21 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
It really does work!
Don't they damage the underlying brick work or other stuff? I think I've heard something like that before.
Spent a minute trying to figure out if I just walked into a botany version of the rickroll xD
Yep, that's a big one. Blinds that respond to sun position or presence can do wonders for keeping indoor temps stable
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.
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If you've ever encountered German rolladen you'll forget all about awnings.
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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).
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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.
You can get away with less because a good part of the power is outside the visible range.
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.
I use a pull-down honeycomb shade with a basement window that's behind my TV:
https://www.amazon.ca/Persilux-Blackout-Cellular-Protection-...
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.
bedroom is ultra-dark, with just a hint of light.
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.
Yet I found I sleep better when my body wakes up with the light instead of in total darkness until an alarm yanks me out of REM
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).
If you get desperate, you can use painter’s tape and aluminum foil.
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.
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You can get very nice sleep masks (padded, shaped to your head, etc) for under $30 online (or much less pleasant ones for a few dollars).
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.
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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.
Curtains.
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.
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.
Could we hear more about your home automation stack? I'm looking to get into this myself.
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
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RE ".....if the particulate level gets high when cooking ....." What is the particale counter level you use ? The number ? Just curious.
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Same. I use the hue automations to handle the lights. HA is for everything else.
The hue motion sensors pay for themselves pretty quickly.
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.
I think you can read about OP's automation stack here: https://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20240412.html