Motorized shades and Calgary's west-facing glare
·8 min read
Calgary gets more sunshine than almost anywhere else in Canada, and the light here has two qualities that make west-facing glass genuinely difficult: it's abundant, and in winter it arrives very low.
If you have west or southwest windows — and especially if you have a mountain view, which is the same thing — you already know the pattern. There's a period each afternoon when the room is unusable, and it moves through the year.
Why winter is worse than summer
This is the part that surprises people who've moved here from elsewhere.
In midsummer the sun is high. It comes through the top of the window and lands on the floor near the glass. An overhang or a deep soffit does a lot of the work for you.
In winter the sun sits low and comes in almost horizontally — straight across the room, into your eyes, onto the television. There's no overhang geometry that stops it. And because our winter skies are frequently clear and there's often snow on the ground reflecting light upward, the effective brightness is higher than the season suggests.
Chinooks compound it. A bright chinook afternoon in January can put more usable glare into a west-facing living room than a July evening.
What that does to a room
Three practical consequences:
Screens become unwatchable. This is what usually starts the conversation. A television on or near a west wall is unusable for a chunk of every clear afternoon.
Rooms overheat. Solar gain through large west glass can make a room several degrees warmer than the rest of the house, so the air conditioning runs to fix a problem that's entering through a window.
Furnishings fade. Sustained direct sun is hard on hardwood, rugs, art and upholstery, and it's cumulative.
Why automation matters more here than elsewhere
Manual blinds solve all of this, in principle. In practice, they don't get used — because the moment they'd help is the moment you're not in the room, or your hands are full, or you simply didn't think about it until the glare was already annoying.
The value of motorized shades isn't the motor. It's that the shade moves without anyone deciding to move it.
Practically, that means shades scheduled or triggered so the west elevation drops during the afternoon and opens again in the evening — before the room becomes unpleasant rather than after. On a large expanse of glass, or on windows that are physically out of reach in a two-storey space, it's the difference between a feature that works and one that's admired and ignored.
Choosing the fabric matters as much as the motor
Most of the outcome is decided by what the shade is made of.
Solar screens cut glare and heat while keeping the view. They're specified by openness factor — a lower number blocks more and obscures more, a higher number preserves the view and blocks less. For a room where the view is the point, this is usually the answer, and choosing the right openness is the whole decision.
Blackout blocks everything. Right for bedrooms and media rooms, wrong for a living room where you'd be trading a view problem for a cave problem.
Dual roller systems put both on one window — a solar screen for the afternoon and blackout for the evening. More cost, and in a primary bedroom or a room with a screen, it's often what people actually want.
There's a real tension worth naming: the reason you have that window is the view, and any shade that solves the glare completely also removes the view. The good outcome is usually a solar screen chosen carefully enough that the room becomes comfortable while you can still see out.
Lighting and shades belong together
Once shades move on their own, they change the light in the room — which means the artificial lighting should respond too. A room that drops its shades at four o'clock in December wants its lamps to come up at the same time, not an hour later when someone notices it's dark.
This is the point where lighting and shade control stop being two purchases and start being one system. Our guide on RadioRA 3 vs Caséta covers where that line falls.
If you're building
Get power to the window heads at rough-in. It's trivial while walls are open and genuinely awkward afterwards — particularly on tall windows in a two-storey space, where retrofitting means scaffolding. See pre-wiring a Calgary new build.
There's a working shade simulator on our Lutron lighting and shades page if you want to see how different fabrics and openness factors actually look before deciding.
Or get in touch and we'll look at the windows.