posted 3 hours ago
When I was a kid, there were several people who were from the 19th Century. The one thing they all had in common is that most rooms had curtains on the wall. This seemed so silly to me, something medieval perhaps. Curtains are for windows and maybe 10 inches either side. Not for walls.
But now I wonder if they were on to something. Time to experiment.
Well, I have a problem with one bedroom in the house. The room is West-South-West facing and, if it has any insulation at all, it's unlikely to be above an r4 given when it was built. The windows and hidden wood in the wall around them were upgraded to modern standards, but the wall was not. The sun gets fully on this wall from about 3pm to sunset (10-ish) and the room is easily 90-100F (35-40C) by the end of the day. It's even worse on those rare occasions when the world outside gets over 30C during the day!
We've tried a lot of different things. The potted Yuzu trees have done a lot to help as too has hanging a bamboo shade from the eves outside. honeycomb blinds on the window shut just before the sun hits, then open again after sunset. All help get it to the temperatures I listed above. Without this, I don't know how hot it could get.
It's also one of those walls that radiates cold back into the house in winter. Insulation is so important.
But what do we do if we can't open up the wall and stuff it full of the insulation that should be there?
When we replaced the curtains for the window, I got extra ones. The math didn't math well, so it was cheaper to get four panels of blackout curtains too big than to get two the right size for the window. I put the rod up high next to the celling so the curtains wouldn't cover the heater. And went wall to wall. The entire wall, except the heater (and the space around it for safety) is now covered by blackout curtains. They aren't even fancy heat stopping ones. Just light weight and light stopping.
It's shocking what a difference this has made.
The room very seldom gets to 80F at the hottest and stays closer to 72F (sorry, inside temperature is still mostly F in Canada - something like 20 to 26C maybe) . Even if I forget to close the curtains over the window during the heat of the day, they block so much heat coming in through the walls that it makes a significant difference.
I had imagined they would be useful in the winter, but I didn't believe they would do so much good in the summer. Maybe they knew something useful back in the 1880s when wall curtains were all the rage?
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