HAYWARD — When it comes to exterior shade solutions, awnings are a common choice for home and business owners. When choosing an awning, it’s important to be aware of your options, including fabric and metal designs. Here’s some basic information about fabric and metal awnings and the advantages of each:
Fabric awnings The main advantages of a fabric awning are design customization and affordability. Awning fabric is available in a wide variety of custom color options, including both solid colors and multicolor patterns. You can even have a graphic or logo printed on your fabric awning—a particularly useful option for business owners.
In addition to fabric design, the method of installation can impact the aesthetic look of an awning. The best method is known as wire tack. With this method, the fabric is secured through a pocket sewn into the inside of the frame; next, a wire is inserted and then tacked to the frame with self-drilling screws. This method provides a nice, straight line and even spacing between the screws, creating a more symmetrical appearance than other frame attachment methods.
On average, a fabric awning will last about 20 years before it needs to be replaced. However, it’s important to note that regular cleanings are required for the awning to reach its full expected lifespan.
Metal awnings The main advantages of a metal awning are ease of maintenance and durability. Unlike fabric awnings, which need to be removed and cleaned by hand, metal awnings can be cleaned by merely spraying them with a hose or wiping them with a cloth. In terms of durability, a metal awning’s metallic constitution enables it to take a lot more abuse than a fabric awning. It won’t rust and it can withstand high winds, falling tree branches, and other potential sources of damage. Additionally, metal awnings don’t need to be recovered or replaced. While they come at a significantly higher price tag than fabric awnings, their durability and longevity provide long-term value that’s well worth the additional investment.

Awning Options

Explore top awning options with expert insights to enhance your outdoor spaces. Discover styles, materials and tips for choosing the perfect awning.

Awning Options by Chih Ling Han

By Chih Ling Han of Acme Sunshades Enterprise Inc.

5 Shade Solutions

Video: Exterior Roman Shades



This is a roman shade that is a pretty popular item for our customers in their outdoor or backyards of their residential homes. This can be installed at any freestanding wood or metal pergola. And part of what we do is we custom build any sort of brackets that you would need to attach to any structure that you have existing on your property.

The nice thing about these roman shades is that they're very low profile. This billowing in the fabric can actually be adjusted so that if you wish, you can have a low hanging fabric when it's fully extended, or when it's fully extended, it can be relatively flat. So there are customizations within there and in addition to the length of the fabric and how it drops down, you can also alternate the textures of the fabric. 

We have the traditional sunbrella material here, which is a solid fabric. It doesn't allow much light to come through and it's pretty strong. This is our mesh fabric, which is a little bit more transparent, has a little bit more of a stretchy texture to it, but it's fully customizable to whatever options our customers need for their purpose.

Now, the roman shade is very sleek. It has this magnet right here. It's easy to just pull back, pull forward, and it'll lock itself in place. And normally you would operate this with a telescopic pole that would extend a minimum of 10 feet, or longer if needed, and you would hook it onto the magnet around here and draw it back or you can draw it forward.

So in addition to ease of use, if maybe you're in an area with inclement weather, the roman shade can easily be detached to the clip right there. Clip right there and then you would detach each clip in sequence to fully uninstall the roman shade to store for winter or whatever sort of seasons or maybe just having work done on the property. 

So it's very easy, very user friendly, and it just looks very good once it's installed.

Video: Exterior Vertical Screens

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Hi.  
Today we're going to talk about vertical screens. Vertical screens has been around for many, many, many years, and most of the time you see a screen, those are the window screens that go indoor.  
Today I want to present you the exterior outdoor vertical screens. As you can see from here, this is made out of fabric. And then most of the time, people use a hand crank like this that operates at the wipe of the corner and open and close the awning. This space, we can motorize that for you. And using the remote control, that way you can just push it back here, the awning will go up and down automatically for you.  
Now, as you can see here, this is made out of fabric. Fabric is one choice. You can also use a mesh as an option. The difference between the two is that the fiber gives you a hundred percent opaque protections and so it's maximum sound protection. However, we can have a choice of a mesh to give you a little more view, so you can see through. If you have a beautiful home with a view, that would be a better option for you. But then, it will protect you between 70 up to 95 sun protection. So, there's a difference between the two so beware that we choose the fabric or mesh options.  
Also, we have the hand bar here, so the bottom bar, we call that for any screens used for attachments. Here, you can see it's what we call the pocket with the weighted chain link, so, that will give you a little more flexible endings. We also have a choice to make that into the hand bar, so you have what's called the bottom bar hand bar. That's used also for holding the fabric together so it doesn't swing in and out when the wind blows.  
For the hand bar to be in place, we have choices. We have three types of attachments for the hand bar. We can also add the cable on the side on both sides, we can have a track to hold the hand bar in place or we can have a way called the zipper track. So here's the explanation for that, there's a little sample case we'll have to show you here. That you can see this is a Phuket set, so it's focused in the sense that you have a focused enclosure right here that's going to this place right here. The one you see over there that's an open roller overboard is exposed. The fabric focusing closures a little bit more to more protection. You pay a little bit more for that but you have a better quotation on that, and this is this one right here.  
This one is also automatic, you have something remote control and then you press the power only go up and down. As you can see this is a user mesh protection so you can see it does have a view for you to see through but it still gives you a very, very good sun protection. This one has what we call the hand bar is hand bar that hold it in between two zipper tracks, so you can see you can penetrate through, it's holding place very good for application where you need a protection for insects so mosquitoes will not go through that and it's very much tight holding place.  
So, this is what the option you have.  


Video: Understanding Fabric and Metal Awnings



One of our flagship items is the traditional fabric awning. There are numerous customization options that you can get with the fabric awning. This one, in specific, has a loose hanging balance, which we can texture in different options, from a straight valance to these ridges right here, even to more of an ocean wave curve. One of the pros for the fabric awning is that you have a variety of textures that you can select for the surface of the fabric. It doesn't have to be just one solid color. We have tweed, we have stripe textures. This is an example of our stripe texture right here, and it's typically installed on a square one-inch by one-inch metal frame.

As far as the frame goes, we do have painting options available. This one is a blue frame, and all our painting is done in-house. One of the advantages of the fabric awning is that we can actually print graphics on it for commercial businesses, which they like. They can either, by way of a simple text graphic, that will illustrate the name of the business, or we can do a more detailed artistic logo. The fabric on the awning is secured through a pocket that is sewn into the inside of the frame, and a wire is put through and then tacked to the frame with self-drilling screws. This is what we call wire tap.

Now, on the advantage of the wire tack is that if you can see it gives you a nice straight line, even screw spacing that looks aesthetically pleasing, and it's very symmetrical as opposed to some of the other ways of attaching fabric to a frame. On average, the fabric for a fabric awning will last about 20 years, with the only reason for a recover being that either the color is faded or just over time. If a fabric awning is around foliage or vegetation, then plant matter can collect and form sort of green splotches or just discoloration on the fabric.

And we do recovers as well. It's pretty standard, and they're pretty simple and easy. The other type of frame that we can do apart from our traditional fabric awning is a metal awning, and typically, our metal awnings will come in the R panel, which is illustrated here by these two red sections, or we have the standing seam variety, which is illustrated by these two blue sections. The advantage to the metal frame over the fabric frame is that there's very little maintenance. These can be cleaned just by running a hose over them or just brushing it off with a broom.

There's not as much variety by way of the stripes or the tweed textures on the panels, but if we do all the in-house painting and any sort of solid color you can think of, you can probably paint the panel for that color. Any size panel can fit these, and they'll be assembled on the panel in an interlocking manner such as this right here, and when they're interlocked and attached to each other, it forms a seamless transition from the start to the end of the awning and will give the look of one continuous sheet of metal over the face of the arm.

Now, as for the standing seam, it's much the same thing except without these textures that interlock at any sort of section, these interlock at one section where we would have these clips right here installed on the frame, and then the other panel was locked into these clips right over them like that -- there we go. So typically, the metal awnings are a lot more durable than the fabric awnings. They can take a lot more abuse in terms of the elements because of the paint and because of how we receive the material.

There's no sort of rust or anything that would happen to the metal awnings. You won't be able to punch a hole through this as easily as you would with the fabric awnings. If there was any sort of high winds and a branch would fall through, and these don't need to be recovered typically. So in terms of expense, it's a little bit more of an investment, but that'll serve you better in the long run because we'll have to shell out money five ten years down the line for a recovery in case anything happens to the surface of the awning. 

Video: Understanding Shade Sails



In this instance, we're going to be talking about shade sails, so shade sails come in a lot of different styles, a lot of different materials. We can do a medium weight and heavy weight fabric. The difference between our medium weight and the heavy weight fabrics in comparison to what you find online is the online versions will last a year, maybe two if you don't have any wind. Our fabrics last at the very minimum of 15 years. With care, they usually last a lot longer. So let's talk about some of the materials that we use for the design and build of the shade sails.

So we use a small stainless hardware, stainless turnbuckles in every size imaginable. These are size 2, the exact specifications of each shade sail. We also have a couple different styles of the d-rings. For the lighter shade cells, we'll use a standard d-ring. For the heavier shade sales, we use a thimble style d-ring that captures the heavier cable a little better. We have different styles of hookups and brackets. So our brackets are all built to specifications that meet the needs of the customer. We have a couple options for our shade sales. We use a quarter-inch steel wire rope; this is extremely strong. It has a tensile strength of over 8,000 pounds. We also have another option of a synthetic kevlar reinforced rope. What's nice about this is it has a tensile strength of over twelve thousand pounds so you get added strength. Also, if you're going to remove your shake sail during the winter months, this makes it easier to fold up. It is 15 of the weight of the steel cable, and it's a lot more flexible.

So the different styles of craftsmanship, let's talk about that real quick. So we have a normal awning thread. This awning thread costs about ten dollars a roll. It works great if you need a five-year lifespan. In five years, the UV rays will degrade this thread to the point where it will just fall apart. We use a special tanara thread; this is close to a hundred dollars for one spool, but the outcome of using this thread is 15 to 20-year lifespan. It is UV resistant to over 20 years. When our shade cells are stitched together, you can see that when the d-ring is connected it's connected in a way that it's completely reinforced. On our shade sail, we use two-inch heavy-duty reinforcing webbing. The webbing is not UV resistant so in order to preserve the life of the webbing for the life of the shade sail, it gets covered. You'll see that the webbing is no longer exposed to the UV light, it's completely covered.

Okay, here we have two different styles of shade sail. One style you'll see has a web that is continuous around the entire perimeter of the shade sail. This is the cheaper version of the shade sail, it doesn't allow much flexibility, it doesn't allow very much annual misalignment. So what happens in this instance is the UV light will start to break down the webbing. Now this style works great if you're out there for a couple years. What we do is our cable feeds through the entire perimeter, in a pocket. This pocket holds the cable snug and the cable goes around the attachment points with the d-rings, it's clamped in place.

Our two most popular fabrics are the sole mesh. This is our medium weight fabric, it's great for shade sales up to about 30 foot in length and width. It comes in a wide array of colors and it's extremely strong, it also has a 15-year warranty. Architect 400 is our heavyweight. This unit can be as large as 100 feet by 100 feet; it can span very large distances. It comes in a wide variety of colors. This has a 15-year warranty against fading, against workmanship, against tearing.

Here at Acme Sunshades, we also do post and bracket installation. All brackets and all posts are done specifically for each customer's application, the height, the diameter, the shape. We offer round tube and as well as square tubing. Our brackets are usually color matched to the house or a gazebo that it's attached to. We can do a wide variety of colors. We use Sherwin-Williams, and we can show you that the Sherwin-Williams palette comes in an almost infinite number of colors so we can color match pretty much any structure. The installations that we normally use are a deck mount. This deck mount style allows a little bit of flexibility so we will have the concrete footing poured. After it's cured, we come in and we mount the vertical poles directly to this concrete using special concrete anchors. 

Chih Ling Han: From Software to Sunshades

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