Hi everybody! For the last two months I've been remodeling my living room and now I'm down to the last details - the carpet and the blinds. I had all the old furniture reconditioned, but the blinds and carpet were unusable. I was thinking about going for some classic wood blinds, but I'm searching for some manufactured from wood trees especially grown for the industry - so far I only found big furniture pieces made from this type of timbers, but not blinds. Any idea where can I find those? Any recommendation will be appreciated.

Thank you for the advice Lee, but as far as I know wood is a natural insulator so there shouldn't be a problem with using wood blinds - nevertheless, I'll look into it and hopefully I'll find some good blinds

I believe you will be surprised about how low the R-value is on something as thin as a wood window blind.  Let us hope that the window industry will steadily improve their product so that insulating blinds or shutters will not be needed.

Alton and others-

I have taken measurements of the R-value of room-darkening, double-cell cellular shades with side seals, and found them to provide an R-value of 2.0 (ft²-degF-hr/Btu) at about 20 F, so a considerable improvement over windows without window coverings.  However, dropping the side seals reduces the R-value by more than a factor of two, so most window coverings would likely be less than R-1.  Wood blinds would presumably have convection both around the edges and between the slats, as well as significant conduction through the thin wood slats.  

(These R-values are much lower than what is advertised, but there seem to be no standards for measuring R-values for shades.)   

Lee Dodge
http://www.ResidentialEnergyLaboratory.com
in a net-zero source energy modified production home

I finally found some "green" wood vertical blinds - they're made from FSC approved oak timbers - got them online over at http://www.blindsuk.net/vertical-blinds.html . Thank you for the advices - got the blinds in custom size and they are to be installed outside the recess of the window, for extra insulation.

Are interior plexiglass 'storm' panels worth adding in winter? summer?

Energy efficiency optimization can be achieved by installing one of the EcoTrack series of cellular shades. The EcoTrack system includes side tracks that eliminate the gaps, however small they may be, between the shade and the window frame.

"EcoTrack" is a private label name for the more widely known "ComforTrack" shades made by ComforTex.