Cordless Outdoor Sun Shade With Protective Valance - Chalk

I live in Southern California and have a west-facing room I use as a home office. WFH is a now a norm and I can't face another summer of sweating it out. My room faces the full sun in the afternoons. The sun bakes an insulated 8-foot wide glass slider and the glass gets very warm to the touch from the inside of the room. I have blackout curtains that can’t do much against an afternoon of hot sun. Central air conditioning is of limited help because this room gets so much hotter than the rest of the house. With the sun shades in place, the glass is now cool to lukewarm to the touch. I estimate my room is easily 20 degrees cooler with the shade's protection. Today it got up to 80 degrees outside so we'll see how the sun shade performs in hotter weather. However, the before and after today is wonderful! The shades allow in plenty of light and I can even make out some images of the outside because it has some transparency. Before I purchased this, I wasn’t sure if the 8-ft wide shades should be wide enough for my sliders or if the brackets for the valence can be flexibly located. At the time I planned to locate and screw them into studs which meant I needed the brackets to be able to slide on the back of the valence. I called Keystone and a live person picked up the call and answered my questions which gave me the confidence to order these online. Who wants to return this unwieldy thing? Also the Keystone brand was more expensive than other brands and no-name brands on another popular ecommerce site. I wanted a quality sun shade that can be installed without issue and hoped this would be worth the investment. I was not disappointed. Installation was not too bad although I ended up screwing this to stucco after talking to a Lowes person who said stud finders aren’t very reliable (which turned out to be true, especially after mistakenly leaving it in the sun for a few minutes). So, I bought a masonry drill bit and drywall mount/screws. I was most nervous about two things. 1) The drill bit would crack the stucco on my newly painted house and make an unsightly mess, 2) There are 3 mounting brackets and lining up the third/middle one may require re-drilling. 1) No cracking although my drill is wimpy and I had trouble drilling deep enough in a couple of spots. If/when I ever remove the sun shade, I will have to do patch work because the holes are ugly. 2) There should be no problem aligning the two end brackets. Afterall, 2 points make a line. You just have to make sure it’s level. The middle bracket is more tricky. I tied a string between the two end brackets and marked my holes. Worked! Because of the width of this shade and weight, it required 2 people to finish the job to hold up each end of the shade to clip into the mounting brackets. I did all of the drilling and prep work and just asked my husband to help clip the sun shade in the brackets. My DIY skills are not advanced and I have limited tools. This was “no sweat” … pun intended.

Easy to install. Easy to operate. Installed above western facing French doors. Keeps room cooler. This is our third such purpose. My only concern is the bottom rod is pvc instead of metal conduit. No biggie.