When considering the best fabric and colour to use for your roller shades, performance/fenestration properties can help with the selection process.
Generally mid tone grey / charcoal colours are widely used on roller shades for offices and schools, for providing the best performance values across all criteria.
Lighter Colours
Lighter non metallised coloured fabrics are more effective in solar reflectance and reducing solar energy but more susceptible to glare.
Darker Colours
Darker non metallised fabrics perform well in reducing solar and light transmittance and offer a better visual view-through and glare reduction.
Performance Properties
The main fenestration properties for roller shade fabrics relate to visual light and heat and can be found on most roller shade fabric brochures for comparison.
Tv% – Visible (v) light transmittance (T)
The proportion of visible light transmitted through the shading fabric.
Darker colour fabrics will have a lower Tv% than light colours.
Sun Screen fabrics with openness factors of more than 3% will allow greater amounts of visible light through the fabric.
As%– Solar(s) Absorbance (A)
The amount of solar energy absorbed by the fabric.
Darker colours will have a greater solar absorption value than lighter colours.
Rs% – Solar(s) Reflectance(R)
Measurement of solar energy reflected by the fabric.
A higher value will perform well at reflecting solar energy.
Metallised fabrics provide the best RS values and are consistent across all colours within a collection.
Ts% – Solar(s) Transmittance(T)
The percentage of solar energy transmitted through the shading fabric.
Darker colours provide a lower percentage and a greater performance at reducing solar energy than lighter colours.