Awning or screen? Start with the problem, not the product

People usually arrive at this decision from the wrong end. They have seen an awning they like, or a neighbour has a screen, and the question becomes which one to buy. It is a better question to ask what is currently wrong with the space, because the two products fail at each other's jobs.

A retractable awning creates shade over an area that does not have any — a patio, a deck, a stretch of paving outside a door wall. It is a horizontal solution to a vertical problem: the sun is up there, and the awning gets between it and you.

What it is not is weather protection. SunPro, who manufacture the awnings we sell, state plainly in their warranty documentation that their awnings are not rain, storm or hurricane rated, and their exclusions specifically name wind damage from leaving an awning out in inclement weather and damage from water pooling in the fabric. An awning is a sun product that retracts. Treating it as a roof is how people break them.

A motorized screen drops down across an opening you already have — a covered porch, a pergola bay, a garage or patio opening. It works vertically, and it is doing one of two quite different jobs depending on the mesh.

With an insect mesh, it turns a covered outdoor space into a usable room in July without framing anything in. With a solar mesh, it cuts the low afternoon sun that a roof overhead cannot do anything about — because at five o'clock the sun is not above you, it is in front of you. That is the case an awning genuinely cannot solve.

Go and stand in the space at the time of day it is unusable, and notice where the sun is. If it is overhead and there is no cover, you have an awning problem. If there is already a roof over your head and the sun or the insects are coming in from the side, you have a screen problem.

Plenty of houses have both, on different elevations, and there is nothing odd about that. A west-facing porch and a south-facing patio are different questions about the same building.

Whichever way you go, exposure is the thing that decides whether a retractable product is appropriate at all. SunPro's screen warranty documentation carries a 40 MPH wind-use disclaimer, and their awning documentation excludes wind damage from leaving the unit out. Both are retractable for a reason.

If your site is genuinely windy — an open ridge, a hillside, a corner that funnels — say so early. It changes the product recommendation, and it makes a wind sensor less of an accessory and more of a requirement.

Bring the question to the measurement rather than trying to settle it from a catalog. Standing in the space, at the elevation, with a tape measure, is how this gets decided properly — and it is also when the estimate becomes a real price.

The measuring guides on this site will get you a working number in the meantime, and (571) 366-7862 gets you a conversation.