Save Oodles with Extra-Efficient Cellular Shades
 If your home is average, you lose one-fourth of the energy you use to heat and cool it right out the windows. Now the good news: cellular window shades are among the best insulators available, and putting up insulated shades is "more cost-effective" than putting in energy-efficient windows. (We didn't just make this up -- The U.S. Department of Energy says so -- scroll about half-way down their page to see what they say about insulated shades.)
Why? Heat moves towards cold. So in winter heat inside your house will try to go through a window to the colder outside. In summer, heat outside gets in through windows to warm up air-conditioned air.
Windows do afford some protection. Every window has something called the "R-value," which rates its resistance to heat movement. It doesn't matter whether you live in 120-degree Arizona or sub-zero Alaska, you want windows with as high an R-value as possible to protect indoor temperatures and lower your heating and cooling bills.
Unfortunately, most windows have an R-value that is only somewhere between 0.9 and 3.0. But you don't have to install new windows designed by NASA to raise your R-values. Just install cellular shades, which give you R-values from 2.0 up to 4.8!. Cellular shades have air pockets between the layers of fabric which trap air and prevent its escape. They come in single cell, double cell, and triple cell shades. The more cells, the higher the R-value. So go for the triple cell shades where you need the most insulation.
But even a quintuple cell shade won't increase your window's R-value if you don't close it!
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