Should blinds be up or down in winter?

Should blinds be open or closed in winter? Well, when it comes to the usual functions you want your blinds to perform like providing you with privacy or for some types of blinds, filtering the light, you’ll probably just want to open and close them as normal in line with your requirements.

However, there are other elements in play too; for many people, this might include the need to keep the house warm and prevent draughts/unnecessary heat loss, or the need to get as much natural light as possible during the darker months of the year.

In this blog post, I’ll go over each of these points in a little more detail, to help you to decide your own answer to the question of should blinds be up or down in winter, and why.

Why should blinds be up or down in winter in different situations?

First of all, it’s important to keep the overriding functional purpose of your blinds in mind before you start drilling down into geek territory! By this I mean, if you’re suffering from screen glare, you’d want to close the blinds or adjust them to filter the light to prevent this (for adjustable blinds) regardless of your general plan for leaving your blinds in a certain position when they’re not directly needed to perform a function.

So, controlling your privacy and filtering or blocking the light as needed are the first things to consider in terms of what position you want your blinds in during winter when you’re using the room.

With that out of the way, when it comes to rooms you’re not using or in which privacy or overly- bright sun (during a British winter? We should be so lucky) aren’t an issue, why should blinds be up or down in winter in different situations?

There are a couple of factors in play to help you to decide here, and annoyingly, both of them might be equally important to you and yet they’re contradictory to each other, and you can’t have both!

The two factors that most people find important in winter when it comes to blinds position are insulating the window/room/home to keep the temperature comfortable without excessive heating bills, versus allowing your home and yourself to get as much natural light as you can when there’s not a lot of that around.

Should blinds be up or down in winter if you want to conserve heat?

Should blinds be up or down in winter if your main priority is keeping the house warm, and/or not spending more on your energy bills than you have to? In this situation, your blinds should be closed.

Closed blinds, regardless of the blind type, help to insulate the window they’re on. Some blinds are far better at this than others, but a blind – particularly a very thermally efficient one – can make a massive difference to the amount of heat that escapes via your windows.

This is likely to be particularly important to you if you’ve got large or poorly insulated windows that are the main culprit when it comes to heat loss from your home.

Even if your home and windows as a whole are really well insulated and energy-efficient, closed blinds will still help you to keep the heat you’re paying good money for on the inside of your home rather than the outside.

Should blinds be up or down in winter if you’re struggling to get enough natural light?

On the flipside, the last couple of years has seen a huge increase in the number of people work-from-homing, thanks of course to Covid; and this might well mean that it is integral to your ability to work (and see) to have your blinds open.

There’s also the fact that we get far less natural light in the winter than we do in the summer as it is, without shutting out the little light that we do get as well; and so, you might want to keep your blinds open during the day in the rooms that you use to help with this.

A reasonable number of people in the UK suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder; probably many more than we think, as not everyone recognises it even when badly affected by it. Generally trying to get as much natural light as possible is integral to weathering the winter as comfortably as possible for people with SAD, and even people who are annoyingly perky and full of get up and go in winter can benefit from this as well.

So, should blinds be up or down in winter if you’re struggling to get enough natural light? Open definitely; but as soon as it gets dark, you might want to think about closing them as the benefit of allowing the light in will have passed, and your closed blinds will then help you to conserve heat.

Should blinds be up or down in winter in rooms you don’t use or possibly, heat?

If you have a spare room or other rooms that don’t get used very much or at all, what position should their blinds be in during the winter? The best bet in this situation is to keep the blinds closed to conserve heat, opening them as needed if and when you use the room.

However, it’s not a good idea to leave a blind fixed in any one position for weeks or months on end, as this can lead to dust and dirt gathering in horizontal parts (like along the slats for slatted blinds, and in the folds for Roman blinds), and their operating mechanisms starting to stick.

To counter this effect, I suggest giving all of your blinds a light dusting every couple of weeks, and opening and closing them to their full extent as part of this, before leaving them in the position of your choice once more in order to prevent problems.