Video: Understanding Shade Sails

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.