Are VELUX blinds worth it?

VELUX sells several blinds and they do different jobs, so the first question is which problem you have.

• Blackout blind. An opaque fabric in side channels that blocks light down the edges as well as through the cloth. This is the one worth paying for on a bedroom, a nursery or a room with a television. A generic roller pulled across a roof window leaves light leaking round three sides, and on a sloped window that gap sits right in your eyeline when you are lying down.
• Roller and pleated blinds. These filter and soften daylight rather than kill it. Good for a landing, a study or a bathroom where you want privacy and a gentler light, not full darkness.
• Venetian blind. Adjustable slats that let you aim the light. Useful in a kitchen or home office where you are steering glare off a worktop or a screen through the day.
• Awning blind. A mesh fitted on the outside of the window. You still see out, but it stops a large share of the sun’s heat before it ever reaches the glass. For overheating, this is the only blind in the range that changes the physics rather than tidying up after it.

So “are VELUX blinds worth it” is really five separate questions. A blackout blind for sleep is almost always worth it. An awning blind for a hot south-facing room is worth it. A decorative interior blind bought in the hope of cooling a conservatory-hot kitchen will disappoint you, and it is worth understanding why before you spend the money.

Glare and heat feel like the same complaint on a bright afternoon, but they are two different physics problems and blinds treat them very differently.

Glare is visible light hitting your eyes or bouncing off a surface. Any interior blind cuts glare, because it simply gets between the bright glass and you. A pleated or roller blind pulled halfway down will take the harsh edge off a screen in minutes.

Heat is solar energy, most of which you cannot see. When sunlight lands on an ordinary interior blind, the fabric absorbs that energy, warms up, and then radiates it straight back into the room. The glass is already behind the blind, so the heat has passed the point where you could have turned it away. That is why a blind can leave a room dim and still stifling. An external awning works because it intercepts the sun on the outside, where the heat it absorbs is carried off by the air rather than trapped against your ceiling.

This matters more here than almost anywhere. Southend-on-Sea faces south across the Thames Estuary with an open horizon and light reflecting off the water, so a south-facing rear roof collects sun from mid-morning until it swings west. On the wide 1930s semi belt across Westcliff, Thorpe Bay and out towards Hadleigh, the back of the house very often faces south, and a rear extension with roof windows over a kitchen turns into a solar collector. An interior blind will not tame that room. The energy is already inside by the time the fabric sees it.

If the problem you are trying to solve with a blind is a room that overheats, the blind is the wrong end of the chain to start at. The energy budget is set by the glass, and the glass is where a hot room is won or lost.

The figure to know is the G-value, the proportion of the sun’s energy that passes through the glazing. Clear double glazing sits around 0.6, letting roughly 60 per cent through. Solar-control glass sits nearer 0.3, so it turns away twice as much heat before anything reaches the room, and it does it every hour of every sunny day without you touching a cord. On a south-facing or a flat roof, where the glass sees high summer sun almost square on, that specification does more than any interior blind can. This is the heart of our energy-efficient skylight installation work, and it is why we talk about orientation and glass before we talk about accessories.

None of that makes blinds pointless. It sets the order. Get the glass right for the heat, then add a blind for darkness, privacy and glare, which is what interior blinds are genuinely good at. If a room already runs hot and the windows are due to be swapped, that replacement is the moment to sort the glass specification, and a blackout blind afterwards then only has to do the job it is built for.

Two practical choices decide whether you are happy with a blind for years.

The first is how it is powered. Manual blinds are cheapest and perfectly good on a roof window you can reach with a pole. Solar blinds carry a small photovoltaic cell and a battery, charge themselves off daylight, and run from a remote with no wiring at all, which suits a window over a stairwell or above a kitchen island you cannot get to. Mains-wired electric blinds are worth planning only if you are already running power to the window, for instance for an opening motor, so the cabling goes in behind the plasterboard rather than on the surface afterwards.

The second is fit. VELUX blinds are cut to the exact size code stamped on your window, and they clip into mounting brackets that a factory window already carries, so a genuine blind sits flat in the recess with no daylight gap. A generic blind bought to nominal dimensions rarely lines up with those mounting points, sags away from the frame on a slope, and undoes the neat edge sealing that makes a blackout blind actually black. If the window itself is a VELUX unit, a VELUX blind is the one that fits the brackets it was built around. Our VELUX window installation page covers how those size codes work and where to read yours.

Decide which problem you are buying for. If it is sleep, privacy or glare, a genuine blackout or filtering blind sized to your window code is money well spent, and a solar version pays for itself in convenience on anything out of reach.

If it is a room that overheats, treat the blind as the finishing touch and the glass as the answer. Stand in the room, note which way the roof faces and whether it is pitched or flat, and if it runs hot in summer, the glass specification is where to spend first. Tell us the orientation and the rough opening size and we will come back with a glass specification and a price, and advise on the blind that belongs with it. Ring 01702 898232 or request a quote, and we will look at the whole roof rather than just the cloth you hang under it.