Filia - innovation in solar energy

by Startacus Admin

Filia is a startup that's aiming to bring solar energy to every home by integrating solar technology into the fabric of their blackout blinds.

A decade ago, solar panels were a pretty rare sight, and you wouldn’t often see them on residential properties. Fast forward through the years, and we see them popping up on many new builds as a standard feature. They can gather enough energy to heat your water in summer without the need to put on the heating or the immersion; they can save us some money in a time when energy prices are getting out of hand. 

But not everyone can afford full solar panels, and not everyone lives somewhere where solar panels can be installed - in fact, the number of people living in densely-populated urban areas, in flats, is growing.

English startup Filia was created to find a way around this issue. By turning every window you have into a solar farm, you’ll never miss out on gathering energy from the sun. 

The startup allows this with their PV-enabled window blinds, which are blackout blinds sporting a thin solar film that collects solar energy. This film is created using a printing technique that deposits perovskite compounds into microgrooves etched onto a flexible film, which is then adhered to a blackout blind. This film is supposedly more effective in lower light areas, such as in the shade of a neighbouring building, than traditional panels.

The blackout blind keeps a room cooler in the summer, so you don’t come home after work to find your TV has melted, and warmer in the winter. With the UK edging closer to the surface of the sun every year, having this option to keep a bedroom cooler, for example, is as enticing as free, clean energy. 

In some hotter countries, it is standard practice to keep blinds or shutters closed during the day to keep the sun at bay, so what better way to take advantage of that fact than by turning those blinds into solar panels? And if you don’t want to seem like an antisocial hermit, the blinds have a companion app that can control when they open and close automatically.

 

 

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• #innovation
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• #solar
• #environment

Published on: 22nd August 2022