There is one room in this house that gets the sun like it’s being interrogated.

By nine in the morning it is already too bright to think in and by eleven it is hot in a very specific way that makes you feel like you are being quietly punished for something. Meanwhile, two rooms over, it is still a bit cold and slightly damp and you could believe, quite sincerely, that the sun has never been informed of their existence.

So begins the daily curtain routine.

Open the south ones. Close the east ones. Half-close the one that doesn’t quite close because the rail is bent. Forget the back room. Remember the back room. Realise you’ve just turned the house into a slow cooker again. Repeat.

We have, at this point, an embarrassing number of “temporary” solutions. Two proper curtains. One blind that came with the house and feels like it’s made out of a recycled crisp packet. One thing that might once have been a sheet. And a heroic piece of cardboard that did a full tour of duty last summer and should probably have been pensioned off.

Some of this works. Some of it is just us pretending to be in control.

What I didn’t really understand before living here is how much timing matters more than material. If you miss the moment and let the sun in, that room is done for the day. It keeps the heat like it’s proud of it. In winter it’s the same story in reverse. You finally get a bit of warmth into a room and then you lose it because someone opened something “just for a minute”.

We spend a lot of time chasing the house.

Part of that is because we’re still on a small solar setup, and you become very aware that not using power is often more important than generating it. That finally clicked this winter. Before that, it was mostly me staring at cloudy skies and pretending numbers were going to save us.

Curtains and blinds feel low-tech compared to batteries and inverters. They shouldn’t. They’re doing real work, every day, whether you think about them or not.

The other shift is that you stop thinking in terms of “comfort” and start thinking in terms of load. Heat load. Light load. How much the building is being asked to deal with before you even touch a switch.

Which is how I’ve ended up, slightly against my will, thinking about automatic blinds.

Not in a “look at my clever house” way. More in a “i am tired of playing curtains like a broken instrument” way.

The obvious use is summer. Keep things shut before the sun gets in. Open them when it’s gone. Do it whether you’re home or not. The less obvious use is winter, when you actually want the sun in certain rooms at certain times and then want to keep it there.

At the moment, we are the control system. We are not very consistent.

The other day I ended up googling this stuff, mostly out of curiosity, and fell down the usual hole. That’s how I found a company called Clearly Automated who specialise in this kind of thing. I’m not buying anything, but I did end up reading through their Lutron stuff and thinking, yes, that’s what people mean when they say “do it properly”. If you want to see what I mean, take a look at their Lutron page.

We’re not installing anything like this yet. We’re still fixing doors that don’t close properly and discovering new ways the house leaks air. But I finally understand why people who do this properly talk about systems instead of gadgets.

For now, we’ll keep doing it by hand. Open. Close. Forget. Remember. Swear. Adjust.

But it’s one of those things that’s moved from “nice idea” to “this is actually part of how the house behaves”. Which is usually the stage just before we eventually do something about it.

In the meantime, the sun will carry on hammering that one room like it’s got a personal issue with it. And we will carry on negotiating with a bent rail and a curtain that used to be a sheet.