How can smart sensors protect your furniture?

It’s also the time to head off on day trips to the beach, or maybe venture abroad.

Basically, we like to enjoy our time off in the summer by spending it outdoors and away from home, taking a break and creating magical memories. Everything warms up under the intense summer sun: air, water, and of course our homes. This makes us love summer days all the more, since we don’t need to pile on layers of clothing when everything is so warm and pleasant.

But there are some downsides to the summer sunshine too. For one thing, any interior furniture left exposed to direct sunlight day after day has a tendency to fade. Colours that started out vivid and bright grow dull when the sun’s rays hit the pigments in them.

Say goodbye to sun bleaching by making your home smarter

If you have electric blinds or shutters, you can solve this problem and protect your furniture. A sun sensor that measures lux value (the amount of light that hits a specific surface area) can be used to activate your blinds or shutters automatically, pulling them down or closing them completely as required to keep your upholstery shaded.

Sun sensors can be placed inside a room, outside on the building façade or on a window. As the sunlight grows more and more intense, the sensor will pick this up and send a signal to the blind or shutter motor, either directly or via a smart controller such as a TaHoma switch. Then your roller blind will be pulled down, your terrace awning drawn open, your curtains closed or your Venetian blinds re-angled – and you don’t even need to be at home yourself to do this. So you’ll have nothing to worry about and can go and relax on the beach all day long knowing that your home will take care of itself.

Bringing more automation into your home offers other benefits too. For instance, when you do arrive back after a day out, your house will be nice and cool thanks to your automated shading, so you won’t need to switch on the air conditioning so much. That has the added bonus of helping you save on energy costs. So it’s good for you, good for the environment and – last but not least – good for your furniture too!