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The "Technology Connections" youtube channel recently discussed awnings too. (And it had more or less the same message as this blog.)
And that has way more details than this. The only why supplied here is "we forgot" and "AC"
Thanks, it even mentions low-e glass which I was wondering about.
It surprises me to read about "fixed metal frame" awnings. You don't _have_ to make that trade off.
In the Netherlands a lot of houses have electrically retractable awnings (or even just mechanically windable by hand), especially above the giant windows facing the back yard.
During winter and bad weather, we retract the awning. When it's too sunny, we deploy it.
typical row house layout with big windows on both sides: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorzonwoning
retractable awning: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zonnescherm
A house I lived in during the pandemic had a pergola covered in wisteria vines over the south facing windows. In the summer the vines would leaf out and block most of the hot sun, and in the winter the leaves fell away and let in a ton of light.
Worked great, looked great, and smelled great for the two weeks of bloom in may.
In Norway we have them with sensors for wind speed and sun so that they are deployed automatically to shade the window and retracted if the wind rises too high.
We have them in america too. But every moving part comes with inflated costs for both acquisition and ongoing maintenance.
Would you be surprised to learn that in Spain almost all windows have built-in blinds?
"Many"? It seems to me like there are many without. Homeowners Associations everywhere keep blocking them as well because they ruin the street image, so they say. Oh and they block AC too because it's too noisy and the outside unit is too ugly. And so many homes are stuck with scorching summers.
The Netherlands seems like the most sensible country on earth. How did they manage it?
in the row house article's picture I see the house, with the tree, but where's the beestje?
I think the builders of the past would be amazed by modern technology like argon filled double paned windows with advanced window films to reflect the heat instead of letting it in.
But yes, let's bring back the awnings too. Sometimes the low tech ways are easiest and best. I will say that I don't think awnings alone can save a stick built modern house from the heat. Part of the key to old houses staying cool was high thermal mass: lots of brick and stone that could stay cool during the day. As great as modern insulation is at keeping hot and cool separate, a modern insulated wall doesn't cool it's surroundings like a high thermal mass wall would.
Moving to a world where we combine passive cooling and high thermal mass construction with the benefits of modern tech will be key in my opinion.
We have a retractable on our south-facing patio door/window near San Jose and it's made a huge difference in terms of heat rejection after we installed it. On hot summer days it makes a noticeable difference. And since it's retractable it doesn't make the back room permanently dark. It's one of the major items that lets us survive a south bay summer without air conditioning. We'll probably upgrade our gas furnace to a heat pump eventually and get AC "free" but in the meantime this was a much cheaper stopgap.
Anecdotally, it feels like Americans generally don't care about natural lighting. About twenty years ago, my wife was looking for apartments and asked the leasing office if there was any unit available facing south or east. Apparently it was unusual enough a question that the apartment manager asked back if it was for religious reasons.
I might just be unusually sensitive to this, but there is a downside to awnings that hardly ever gets mentioned. Yes, an awning keeps your house cooler by blocking sunlight, but it also blocks sunlight, reducing the natural light inside your house. This means you either sit in the dark or use more artificial light, which is fine except natural sunlight is (for me at least) very beneficial for mood and for maintaining the circadian rhythm.
I know lots of people who don't mind living in darkness or seem to have a personal vendetta against the sun, and maybe those people would be genuinely better off with awnings, but I don't think they're for me.
In hot areas, even the shade of rooftop solar panels can make a substantial difference inside a building. And there's the ultra low tech method of just planting more shade trees.
Unfortunately with most US build tract housing, there's not enough room between most houses to provide dedicated shade by most any method. I wonder if shade between the roof gaps between houses would be useful.
Curiously enough, here in Spain they're still pretty common nowadays, as lots of houses purposely incorporated green awnings, both to protect an exponentially-growing number of these houses from harsh sunlight during summer season, and to presumably 'soften' the arrival to the city of an increasing quantity of newcomers from rural Spain, as they already were very familiarized with them and, the designers thought, would find spots of green on the building more appealing comming from a greener countryside.
Awnings, deep overhanging eaves, attic exhaust fans, floor plans designed for cross-ventilation, strategic shade trees - a century ago, there were lots of strategies for keeping cooler without A/C.
And a 1950's house built with none of those advertised "I'm cutting-edge trendy, and rich enough to just run my new A/C all the time" to everyone who saw it.
I went to Granada a few years back and the vast majority of the apartment buildings I saw out there had awnings.
Meanwhile, my new build, West facing single aspect flat in London regularly heats to 30+ degrees celsius because no one thought about heat management.
Houses also made use of the "stack effect". A cupola was put on the roof apex. The cupola was vented on the sides and was open to the attic. Wind blowing across the roof would accelerate because of the slope, then flow through the cupola, sucking the hot air out of the house and creating a cool draft through it.
I don't have a cupola on my house, but did design in the stack effect. You can definitely feel the breeze coming up through the house. It makes the house several degrees cooler without A/C.
The house also has unusually large eaves, which serve the same purpose as awnings.
The house costs half as much to keep comfortable as my previous home.
Squirrels. That's why I don't use awnings.
I've had awnings on my old house destroyed twice by squirrels ripping them apart for nesting.
I think this Johnny cash ad is a great period piece to explain
I added an awning to my roof top deck door because the door wasn’t weather proofed enough to constantly being hammered by Seattle autumn rain. No matter high tech you go, a low tech solution of just something to make sure your door isn’t hammered directly by the rain is good enough to solve that weird leak you have in your 4 year old home.
Awnings are still pretty common in Australia.
We have them on our house. In Australia it's very much worth getting awnings and ceiling fans as well as having a heat pump.
In summer afternoons they can make a really remarkable difference.
>and the fabric covering would need to be replaced every 8-10 years depending on exposure and climate.
Absolutely not.
I recently drove past my childhood home. The canvas awnings that were there 30 years ago are still there, and look fine. Almost everything else about the house has changed.
My first condo was built in the 50s and had metal (not metal framed, but painted metal) awnings. The previous owner had removed one awning (presumably due to disrepair) and the room with no awning was at least 5 degrees warmer than the other rooms in the summer.
I've even calculated optimal dimensions for pergola-type awnings on my house, but I detest the condescension directed towards insulation. The author has apparently never sat next to an uninsulated southwest Denver wall baking in the sun in early August.
I've got a row of pine trees on the south side of my house that do the same thing as awnings. High summer sun is blocked by the canopy. Low winter sun passes below the branches and reaches the windows. I'm 43°N.
I think the idea that it was AC or natural light and what not is a bit simplistic. E.g. here in socal its pretty common to see people cover a window entirely in the heat with like newspaper or tin foil and lack AC. Likewise there are a lot of old homes and apartments built in the 1920s that used to have awnings (visible in historical photos often) and no longer do, and they don't have central air either (maybe a couple window units which also block light).
I think the reason is simply that awnings take maintenance and are more costly. They eventually rot out from the sun and fall apart, needing replacement. Replacing an awning is not necessary to rent an apartment or sell a home, so it isn't done. If you had a ratty old one you'd probably just remove it vs replace. And even if you did want to replace that awning today, where do you even get one? They don't sell them at the hardware store like they might have 100 years ago. You'd probably have to order custom sized pieces from some company. Probably a couple grand in the materials and installation right there to do up all the windows. Plastic blinds on the other hand are like $50 at the hardware store and you can install them with a drill in 2 mins.
I can’t say enough good things about The Craftsman Blog. Was my primary source for learning how to rebuild my 100-year-old double-hung windows. Lots of good stuff to explore.
The American Southwest, especially the Sonoran Desert, was once a refuge for those who suffered respiratory ailments. Doctors would "prescribe" a change of scenery for allergies, asthma, tuberculosis, COPD, etc. People moved here because there was so little pollen in cleaner air, due to sparse population, as well as the lack of grass and other conventional foliage.
However we also have a little feature we lovingly call "Valley Fever" which is a fungus, spread mostly by dust storms. As more Midwestern folks immigrated here, and the Snowbirds set up shop, they all wanted traditional lawns, trees, and golf courses, just like "back home". So by the 1980s-1990s, Phoenix was barely differentiated from Chicago or Kansas in terms of front yards.
Now, those gardens definitely kept things cool in a local area. They needed things like flood-irrigation, so deep water often covers lawns. Deciduous or even evergreen trees can afford a lot of shade where you really, really need it. Unfortunately, monsoon microbursts often topple those kinds of trees, which have shallow roots in impoverished, sandy soils.
Ironically, due to lack of water, and Greta Thunberg, we're reverting to desert landscapes (called xeriscape) and so the new urban domestic hotness here is to install little "drip irrigation" tubes, palo verde, cactus, succulents, yucca, etc. Needless to say, they don't provide enough shade, and the humidity stays quite low.
Phoenicians today are clamoring for more artificial shelter and shade. Bus stops here are works of art with elaborate means of warding off the daytime heat. The city centers are still "heat islands" with murderous temperature increases during summertime ("summertime" in Phoenix lasts from March through October...)
One thing I don’t see covered here is that awnings have never seemed helpful to me in a humid climate. In Florida you can stand in the shade or the sun and barely feel a temperature variation (if at all). In the summer it may only get a few degrees cooler at night, because the air traps all the heat anyway. So even if you have an awning the air is still hot.
It’s greed for money and lack of care about designing decent society. It is cheaper for a developer to build with less anything. More sqr ft by building a bigger boxier flat to the property line with no eves.
Since American's don’t see eves or awnings anymore, they couldn’t expect them.
We get high winds here that would rip any normal awning right off of the house, sometimes from unpredictable dirt devils out of nowhere. I put up a heavy duty wind sock that got ripped to shreds in two years, awning fabric wouldn't last much longer.
Inside window blinds help a lot. I recently discovered the kind of blinds that are built between the double panes of window glass. I got a sliding glass door with them. They're so nice and protected from daily household trauma that I expect them to last far longer than my regular blinds. It'd be great to retrofit the whole house with them. I'd love to have motorized versions that could react to the sun throughout the day.
I practically begged the idiot planners in Ireland for awnings so we could have shade in summer and fewer chances for water ingress and they didn’t care at all. Helps explain why Irish houses are so mouldy.
I was always bummed that my old house had the awnings removed before I bought it. A few of the same design in my neighborhood still had them and they were cool looking. I grew up in a house with awnings and loved them. It's one of those things that people remove in an attempt to 'freshen things up' and make it more 'modern' and kill the charm in the long run, and financially it doesn't make sense to rebuy them once they've been removed.
I used to live in France. We had no A/C, enough climate consciousness not install it, though our east-facing windows were bringing important heat at sunrise. We had awnings installed, with an HomeKit connection, so we could automatically have them closed before sunrise, and opened once the sun would leave this face of the building. We saved a few degrees in this way.
What percentage of US buildings would you say have air conditioning? The amount of UK homes that have AC is basically 0. Although I guess most commercial buildings would have it. I wonder if this is because UK homes are mainly brick, would that make a difference? Absolute max temp here in summer is 40 degrees C for 1 or 2 days and 30 degrees is pretty rare on most days in summer. When I saw the title I'd assumed this was about rainfall and guttering, which is something we do know about in the UK!
I live in a complex and my neighbour on one side has a metal awning over their back door. A neighbour on the other side enclosed their patio in glass and it has windows that can open so that they are at the same angle as an awning.
As a result during summer mornings both of them are blasting me with tight beams of sunlight which increases the temperature in my place while forcing me to keep my curtains closed until later in the morning when they stop blinding me.
> So where did all the awnings go? Two simple words... air conditioning.
I can't help but think this is too bad.
and also shade trees.
I see housing developments where the trees are all cut down, the houses go up, and... they plant trees.
I think of that saying: "A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit."
and I would take it one step further...
Don't cut down the trees, build the houses around them! For shade, and beauty.
I still see awnings. Heck, one of my neighbors down the street has awnings over a couple windows. On a house built less than 10 years ago.
Though locally (PNW) they aren't really an ideal choice because it does not routinely get hot enough in the summer to really benefit but it gets cool and wet all winter long so they mildew. I just planted medium-tall deciduous trees in our west yard instead.
I installed retractable awnings on my huge western facing sliding glass door. They stay deployed all summer and then get retracted in the winter or when we need to use the door, like for a party.
They make a huge difference in how hot the room gets. I can always tell when it's time to deploy them for the season when the room starts to bake.
Site seems down, here's the latest Wayback Machine snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20240421045028/https://thecrafts...
For the lazy: because we have A/C, people didn't feel the need to maintain them, so they lost popularity.
I'm tall. If I had awnings on my windows all I'd ever see would be grass and awning. I have "black out" curtains on my windows and they actually do a fair job reducing the heat of the sun. I can feel the heat radiate from my metal front door.
Definitely on my mind in the UK. We have maybe 10 days a year when cooling is important, but having sun shades would be really nice for perhaps 50 days a year - so makes more sense than an AC solution here I think.
Also they look nice!
> To me it’s really despicable the lack of respect we give these incredibly talented contractors who were able to design and construct these solid structures that have withstood the test of time without the use of computers, power tools, or energy codes.
Chronological snobbery is a whiggish habit.
If anything, architecture today is lazy and mediocre, especially given our technological advantages. People even used to factor in the path of the sun and the direction of the wind to position a house. Some architects and contractors might still do that, but I don't think this is common, because, hey, we have HVAC, and hey, we just want to slap together and flip a shitty development as quickly as possible.
The lack of care, the lack of concern for urban planning, the misuse of material in a given environment, the use of inferior materials and building methods, the lack of concern for posterity who will inherit our mess, the waste, the ugliness -- it's all shameful. If anything comes out of this "green revolution", I hope it is at least a course correction in this space.
When kids are running around the house all the time, sooner or later they get tall enough to bang their heads on the awnings :\
Are they really gone? I think I see them frequently in many buildings while strolling in Europe including the UK.