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HAYWARD — Chih Ling Han: Hi, today, we’re going to talk about vertical screens. Vertical screens have 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 with the exterior outdoor vertical screens. As you can see from here, this is, you know, the fabric. And then most of the time people use a hand crank like this that will operate at one of the corners and open and close the awning. This space, we can motorize that for you and using a remote control. That way you can just push a button here, the awning will go up and down automatically for you.

Now, as you can see here, this is made out of a fabric. Fabric is one choice. You can also use a mesh as option. The difference between the two is that fabric give you a hundred percent opaque protections and so maximum sun protection. However, we can have a choice of a mesh. Mesh will 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 you will put typically between 70 up to 95% some protection. So, there’s a difference between the two. So, be aware of that when you choose the fabric or mesh options.

Also, we have the hand bar here. So, the bottom bar, we call that for any screens are used for attachments. Here, you can see this is what we call the pockets with the way the chain link so that would give a little more flexible endings. We also have a choice to make that into the hand bar. So, you have here what you call the bottom bar, hand bar. That’s used for holding the fabric together so it doesn’t swing in and out when the wind blows. And 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 what we call the zipper track. So, here’s the explanation for that. Isn’t it a sample case we have, we can show you here that you can see. This is a full cassette. So, it’s full cassette in the sense that you have a full cassette enclosure right here that’s going to this place right here.

The one you see over there, that’s open roller. Open rollers expose the fabric. Full cassette enclosures with a little bit more protection. You pay a little bit more for that, but you have a better protection with that. So, this is this one right here, and this one’s also automatic. You have a somfy remote control and you press the button, awning will go up and down. As you can see, this is the use of 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 a, what we call the hand bar. This hand bar, the holder in between two Zipper track. So, you can see, you can through. It’s holding place. Very good for application where you need protection for insects, so the mosquitoes will not go through that. And it’s very much tight hold in place. So, this is one of the options you have.

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HAYWARD — Alexander McCausland: 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 valance, which we can texture in different options from a straight balance to these bridges right here, even doing 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. 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’ll do a painting options available. This one is a blue frame, and a lot of 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 use by way of a simple text graphic that would illustrate the name of the business, or we can do a more detailed artistic logo. The fabric on the awning is secure through a pocket that is sewn in to the inside of a frame and a wire is put through and then tacked to the frame with self-drilling screws and this is what we call wire tack. Now the advantage of the wire tack is that you can see, it gives you a nice straight line, even screw spacing that it 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 has faded or just over time, if a fabric awning is around foliage or vegetation and 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 art panel, which is illustrated here by these two red sections. Or we have the standing seam variant, 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 we do all the in-house painting. In any sort of solid color that you can think of, we can probably paint the panel for that color. Any size panel can fit these, they’ll be assembled on the panel in an interlocking manner such as this right here, and when they’re interlocking 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 awning.

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 in one section where we would have these clips right here installed on the frame, and then the other panel would lock into these clips right over them like that.

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, 10 years down the line for recover in case anything happens to the surface of the awning.

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HAYWARD — Will Fanning: 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 heavyweight fabric. That’s what we offer, we go for two different styles here. And the difference between our medium weight and the heavyweight fabrics in comparison to what you’d 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 all stainless hardware, stainless turnbuckles in every size imaginable. These are sized to the exact specifications of each shade sail. We also have a couple of different styles of the D-rings. For the lighter shade sails, we’ll use a standard D-ring, for the heavier shade sails, we use a thimble style D-ring that captures the heavier cable a little better. And 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 of options for our shade sails. 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 out of a synthetic Kevlar-reinforced rope. What’s nice about this is it has a tensile strength of over 12,000 pounds. So, you get added strength. Also, if you’re going to remove your shade 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, different styles of craftsmanship. Let’s talk about that real quick. So, we have a normal awning thread. This awning thread costs about $10 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 Tenara 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 sails are stitched together, you can see that when the D-ring is connected, it’s connected in a way that is completely reinforced. Our shade sail will 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 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 angle misalignment.

So, what happens in this instance is the UV light will start to break down the webbing. Now this style with the webbing was good if you only need it to last a couple of 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 sails 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 and it comes in a wider variety of colors. This has a 15-year warranty against fading, against workmanship, against tearing.

Our Architect 400 is extremely abrasion resistant. It is a reinforced polypropylene fabric. 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 a 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.

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HAYWARD — Alexander McCausland: 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 in 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 would 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 is 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 shape 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 on to the magnet around here, draw it back, or you can draw it forward.

So, in addition to the ease of use, if maybe you’re in an area with inclement weather, the roman shade can easily be disattached to the 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 worked on the property. So it’s very easy, very user-friendly, and it just looks very good once it’s installed.