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The usual alternative over here, shade cloth, perhaps made of polypropylene or something similar, is dark green, which does ( or can) look good and is very much cheaper, but it works simply by blocking sunlight. It is soft enough to drape onto the glass, and hence is less efficient because it gets hot and transmits heat to the glass by conduction, and the glass radiates it into the the inside ; so very much less efficient. Way back, 50 odd years ago we used to use wooden lath blinds, which were easy to space several inches above the glass, and they worked very well. Linked together by metal clips, they could be rolled up out of the way when the light was poor. But those laths are not made any more - they were actually used by plasterers, making house room ceilings, before today’s plasterboard was invented,
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I have now finished my installation of clean blinds, over new bubble pack on top of spanking clean glass. Took too long, since I worked alone, and my pieces of bubblepak to extend right across the green house from one side to the other were 25 feet long, and the slightest breath of air converted them into sails or even kites, and we have had one storm after another for weeks now. Finally I realised that it is dead calm at dusk - I live one mile from the sea, and we get the effect known to the sailors of old - the land breeze , then the sea breeze. , due to the sea being an enormous reservoir of heat in the winter , often at 8 or9 degrees C when the land may be at zero, and at say 15 in the summer when the land is in the 20s. So I started getting up early and getting an hour in at dawn, each day, until it was finished.
I can see to read a newspaper in there no, without needing a torch... h joke, but with seeds of truth ).