The $3 Amish Shade That Cools Any House... And Why The Power Company Pretends It Doesn't Exist

[00:00:00]There is a roll of silver foil sitting on my workbench right now, still curled up tight the way it comes off the shelf.

[00:00:07]And it cost me $3 at the hardware store in town this morning. $3. A pair of scissors. About 20 minutes of my time this afternoon. And by the time we sit down to supper tonight, my west-facing kitchen window, the one that turns this room into an oven every single July afternoon around 2:00, is going to be cooler than it has been in weeks. No electricity, no repair man driving out from town, no bill waiting for me at the end of the month. Before I show you a single step of how this works, I want to tell you exactly what this $3 roll of foil is not going to do to you because I think you deserve that honesty before you spend even a minute of your afternoon on it. It will not touch a single wire in your house. It will not need a permit, an inspection, or anybody standing on a ladder outside your window with a clipboard. It will not raise your power bill by so much as a penny because there is nothing here to plug in. It will not need a service call. Not this year, not next year, not ever, because there is nothing inside it built to wear out or break down. And it will not cost you anywhere near what a window air conditioning unit cost you to buy, let alone what it cost you to run one all summer, every summer, for as long as you own this house. My name is Isaac Hosteller. I am Amish. I live on a farm in Lancaster County with my wife Miriam and our four children. And in 26 years of raising this family through Pennsylvania summers, I have never once had a window air conditioner running inside these walls. It is not because we couldn't manage one. More than one English neighbor has offered kindly enough to run a line out to the house for us over the years. It is because my grandfather taught me something about sunlight and glass back before I was tall enough to reach the top of his greenhouse benches. And that one lesson has kept every house I have ever lived in noticeably cooler than the ones next door with the compressors running full blast from morning until night. We have raised hogs and dairy cows on this land for three generations now. And every one of those summers, the hottest stretch always arrives right around haying season, when there is no choice but to be out working under that sun from sun up until well past supper. A cool house to come home to at the end of a long day in the field is not a luxury for us. It is the difference between a family that can rest and recover and a family that cannot. That is part of why my grandfather cared so much about solving this the right way, cheaply with materials he already had on hand rather than simply doing without and suffering through it the way some folks assume Amish families must dot. Now, before I walk you through building this, I want you to know two things are coming so you have a reason to stay with me clear to the end. First, there is a mistake almost every single person makes with their outdoor window blinds in the summertime. And it is not a small mistake. It can actually crack the glass in your window, cost you a repair with no warranty to cover it, and most folks have never once been warned about it. I am going to get to that a little further on, and it might end up being the most useful thing in this whole video, even though it is not the main trick I came here to show you. Second, right at the end, once the main lesson is finished, I'm going to hand you five more tricks that my own family reaches for on the worst days of summer. cheap ones, quick ones, things you could be using tonight while you're still deciding whether you want to build the shade at all. So, don't wander off early. There is more waiting for you than just the foil. Here is what most people get wrong about a hot house, and it is worth slowing down on because once you understand this, everything else in this video is going to make a lot more sense. Folks assume a hot house is an insulation problem. They go out and buy weather stripping. They every window in the place. They hang heavier curtains. And then they stand in their living room at 3:00 in the afternoon sweating, wondering why none of it seemed to help. Insulation is built to keep heat in a house. It was never built to keep heat out of one.

[00:04:22]Once the sun has already come through your glass and landed on your floorboards and your furniture and turned into heat sitting there in the room with you, insulating your walls just does a fine job of trapping that heat in with you for the rest of the day. A hot house is not at its root an insulation problem. It is a reflection problem. And nobody sells you a product with the word reflection printed on the box. So hardly anybody ever hears it explained this plainly. Dot. Think of a window on a bright afternoon like a mirror that somebody hung facing the wrong direction. Sunlight passes straight through the glass, strikes everything inside your house, and turns into heat the same way sunlight through a magnifying glass will scorch a dry leaf sitting under it. That heat wants to leave the way it came in. But glass does not let heat pass back out nearly as easily as it let the light pass in.

[00:05:16]So the heat builds. It stacks up hour after hour with nowhere to go. The same way a parked automobile turns into an oven with every window rolled up tight on a July afternoon. Your job, if you want a genuinely cooler house, is not to trap that heat once it has already gotten inside your walls. Your job is to bounce the sunlight back outside before it ever gets the chance to turn into heat in the first place. That is exactly what a mirror does for a beam of light.

[00:05:45]That is exactly what my grandfather's scrap tin roofing did, nailed up along the inside of his greenhouse glass decades before I was born. And that is precisely what this $3 roll of foil is about to do for your window this afternoon. In the trade, men would call this radiant heat reflection. I am only going to say it that way once. After this, I am simply going to call it what it is, bouncing the sun back to where it came from before it ever has the chance to settle into your home. Dot. My grandfather ran a small greenhouse operation for most of his working life.

[00:06:21]And he learned this lesson the hard way, the way most good lessons get learned.

[00:06:26]One July, he cooked half his tomato starts before he ever came to understand that the fix was not more airflow, not another vent cut into the roof, but reflecting the sun back off the glass before it ever made it inside. To begin with, he used whatever scrap tin he had lying around the barn from old roofing jobs, nailed up in strips along the inside of the glass on the worstf facing panes. My grandmother did something close to the same trick in her own way, hanging old quilts over the windows on the hottest afternoons, with the silverbacked batting she saved from worn out coats turned facing outward. She never called it anything more scientific than keeping the sun where it belongs and not letting it wander into my kitchen. Between the two of them, working from two different corners of the same farm, I grew up in a house that never once ran a window unit in a part of this state that gets plenty hot come August, same as yours does, Dot. Now, I have to be honest with you about this because I would rather earn your trust here on the small thing than have you feel let down further along on one of the bigger claims I am going to make before this video is finished. This shade works best on windows that take hard direct sun for several hours a day.

[00:07:43]South facing and west-facing glass, especially the same panes that turn unbearable by midafter afternoon. On a window that already sits shaded most of the day by a tree limb or a porch roof, you are not going to notice near as much difference simply because there was not much heat coming through that window to begin with. And in especially humid weather, the double-sided tape holding the shade against your frame can loosen its grip faster than it would on a dry day. So, you may need to press it back down once or twice across a long, wet summer. I would rather tell you that plainly now than have you write to me in August wondering why the tape gave out on a muggy week. That is the truth of the matter plainly told. This is not magic. It is physics done simply with the cheapest materials a hardware store sells. Here now is exactly how you build it step by step. And I would ask you to write these down if you think you will need to because I am only going to walk through it the one time dot. The first thing you need is a roll of thermal insulation foil. The kind with a reflective silver side sold cheap at any hardware store in town. $3 will buy you enough to cover one goodsized window with room to spare. Dot. The second thing you do is measure the width of your window frame and draw a straight even line down the length of your foil at that same width dot. Third, cut along that line with a sharp pair of scissors, keeping the edge as clean and straight as you can manage. Dot. The fourth thing you will need is any small wooden strip or a plastic rod. I use a leftover lath strip pulled from a scrap pile out in the barn. Cut roughly as wide as the window itself. Dot. Fifth. Lay that strip along one end of the foil and staple it down tight. The staples set close together so it holds firm under tension. This strip is what gives your shade a straight stiff edge to roll itself around the same way a roller shade works in any English home. Dot.

[00:09:49]Sixth. Roll the whole length up nice and snug, making certain the silver side is facing outward once the shade hangs unrolled in the window. Roll it starting from the end with the wooden strip so that strip ends up tucked at the center of the roll like a small spindle holding everything together. Dot seventh. Stick a strip of double-sided tape along the outer edge of the shade. The same careful way you might finish off a binding on a quilt. This tape is going to do two separate jobs for you. It holds the shade firmly against your window frame and it is what you will use in the next step to attach your pull dash string dot.

[00:10:28]Eighth. Attach a length of string to the shade using that same strip of tape, giving yourself a way to raise and lower it by hand. Dot. Ninth. Press the finished shade firmly against your window frame right where you intend for it to hang through the summer. Dot.

[00:10:48]Tenth. And last, screw a small hook or hanger into the wood above the window frame, close enough that you can catch the string and hold the shade rolled up out of the way when you want the light back in. Dot. When the sun is beating hard against that window, you let the shade down and let it do its work. When the day cools off toward evening, you roll it back up and hook it out of the way, ready again for tomorrow afternoon.

[00:11:14]20 minutes of work, $3 spent, and that window stops being the hottest spot in your entire house. Dot. Now, why doesn't every hardware store in this country have a sign pointed straight at this?

[00:11:27]Why does the man selling you a window air conditioning unit never once mention that a $3 roll of foil might solve half your problem before you ever plug his machine into the wall? I do not believe there is some meeting where men in suits agree together to keep this quiet from you. I do not believe in that sort of thing and I would not want you believing it either. I think the truth of it is simpler than that and sadder than that.

[00:11:52]There is no profit sitting inside a $3 roll of foil. Nobody drives out to your house to service it. Nobody sells you a yearly maintenance plan for it or a warranty or a filter replacement. So, it simply never gets mentioned to you. Not because any one person set out to hide it from you on purpose, but because there is no one standing to gain a single dollar from telling you the truth. The silence around it was never planned by anybody. It is only what happens quietly year after year when the only voices allowed near the microphone are the ones getting paid to talk. And the money at stake here adds up faster than most folks would guess. The average household running a central air conditioning system through a full hot summer can spend two, sometimes $300 a month keeping their house livable. And a real share of that money is spent cooling a house that never needed to get nearly that hot in the first place.

[00:12:46]Reflect the sun back before it ever comes inside. And whatever unit you are still running, if you keep one running at all, is not fighting nearly so hard to catch up. That is real money staying in your pocket at the end of the summer.

[00:13:00]And it did not come from anything complicated. It came from simply refusing to let the sun in to begin with. I think about it this way. Across a whole summer in a whole county in a whole country full of houses just like yours, that adds up to more money spent than most of us could ever put a true number to. Money spent fighting heat that a $3 roll of foil could have stopped at the glass before it ever crossed the threshold into somebody's living room. Nobody set out to cost you that money on purpose. It simply keeps happening quietly, house after house, because the people who could tell you otherwise have no reason to dot. Now, I promised you something important earlier and I want to give it to you now before we move on to the bonus tricks because I believe more people in this country need to hear this warning than need to hear about my shade. If your house has exterior blinds and you have gotten into the habit, like most folks do, without ever thinking twice about it, of leaving them halfway down on a hot day, neither fully up nor fully closed, you could be quietly setting yourself up to crack your own window glass. Here is exactly why that happens. When bright sun strikes a half-covered pane, the portion of glass sitting under the shaded part of the blind stays noticeably cooler, while the portion still exposed to direct sunlight heats up fast in a matter of minutes. That leaves you with a sharp temperature difference sitting side by side on one single sheet of glass. And glass does not tolerate that kind of stress well at all. It can crack right along that dividing line, seemingly out of nowhere. And it is never a small or cheap repair to put right. Here is the part of this that stings the worst. Most home warranties will not cover a crack that happens this way because the manufacturer will tell you plainly that it was caused by how the blind was used, not by any flaw in the glass or the window itself. So if you carry away only one thing from this whole video besides the shade, carry away this fully open or fully closed.

[00:15:08]And never leave a blind sitting halfway on a bright hot day. Now, before I let you go for the day, I promised you five more tricks. Quick ones, plain ones, the kind of thing my own family reaches for on the worst afternoons of a Pennsylvania summer, right alongside the shade we just built together. None of these are going to send you on another trip to the hardware store. Most of what you need is likely sitting in your kitchen or your closet right now. We did not come by these all at once, either.

[00:15:37]Some came down from my grandmother, some my wife picked up from her own mother, and one or two we simply stumbled onto over the years, the way most household tricks get discovered by trying something out of pure stubbornness on a night too hot to sleep through. Dot. The first is an old trick built from nothing more than two empty plastic bottles and a box fan. Cut the bottom off each bottle, then poke a ring of small holes around the sides of both. A soldering iron will do the job cleanly, or even a toothpick heated over a flame will get you through it. Just leave the top inch and a half nearest the cap untouched without any holes at all. Zip tie one bottle onto each side of your fan, right over the blades. Drop ice into each bottle and switch it on. The air passing over that ice turns noticeably cooler as it comes through the fan. And once the ice melts down, simply set a cup beneath each cap to catch the water and drop in more whenever you need it. Dot. The second trick is the smallest one here, and it cost you nothing at all beyond a few minutes before bed. Chill a pair of socks in the ice box for a while, or simply wet them down with cold water straight from the tap. Put them on your feet before you lie down for the night.

[00:16:50]Cooling your feet this way sends a signal through your whole body to relax and drift off faster than you would otherwise. My wife Miriam swears by a cold foot soak in a basin on the porch on the very worst nights of August, and I have never once seen it fail her dot.

[00:17:07]The third trick is a wet towel hung across the window at night. Ring it out well first so it does not drip down onto your floor while you sleep. And the moisture pulled slowly out of that towel as it dries will draw a real bit of heat out of the room right along with it. The fourth trick works best in a room with two windows facing each other or two windows set close together on the same wall. Crack both of them open. Hang a wet bed sheet stretched between them using a couple of large binder clips to hold it firm against the window frames and mist the whole sheet down with a spray bottle of plain water. The air moving in through the cracked windows has to pass straight through that wet fabric before it reaches you and it comes out noticeably cooler on the other side. When the sheet dries out toward morning, you simply spray it down again.

[00:17:56]The fifth and last trick is an old ice box recipe my grandmother used long before there was a single electric wire strung through this county. Stir a spoonful of ordinary table salt into a quart of water before you set it to freeze. Salt water freezes down to a colder temperature than plain water does, and it melts a good deal slower once it is out of the freezer. Drop those cubes into a metal bowl set in front of a running fan and you will feel the difference in the air moving through your room within just a few minutes. And if you do run an air conditioning unit alongside everything we have covered here today, let me leave you with a bit of plain practical sense that can save you real money on running it. Keep your windows shut tight the entire time the unit is running. Do not set it any colder than roughly 14° below whatever the temperature is outside because that is as much cooling as your body actually needs and pushing it any colder than that only strains the machine for no real benefit. And keep the unit serviced on a regular schedule so it is never working harder than it truly has to dot.

[00:19:01]So here now is what I would ask you to do this week plainly laid out. Get your $3 of foil from the hardware store and build the shade for the very worst window in your house, the one that turns your afternoons into a struggle every single day. Walk through your home and check every exterior blind you own. And make certain not one of them is sitting halfway down on a sunny day. And pick just one of those five bonus tricks to try tonight simply to feel the difference for yourself before the week is out. None of it costs much. None of it takes long. But I believe if you try even one piece of what I have shown you today, you will notice the difference by the very next hot afternoon dot.

[00:19:41]Tell me down in the comments which window in your own house gets the hardest, worst sun of the day. And let me know whether you are going to try the shade first or one of the other five tricks instead. I read every single comment left under this video, every one of them. And I mean that plainly and truly. Next week, I want to show you something my grandfather built into the north side of our old springhouse, long before I was ever born. A way to keep meat and milk cold, clear through the hardest part of August, using nothing but stone, shade, and a bit of moving water. No electricity involved anywhere in it. No ice delivered by truck.

[00:20:19]Nothing but what the land itself was willing to give him if a man was patient enough to work with it instead of against it. It is one of the oldest tricks left standing on this whole farm and I believe you are going to want to see exactly how it works. Until then, the people who built this country with their hands knew things we are only just starting to