bamboo reed as shade?
 

for the life of me every singe home store. home depot loes.etc. none that i have visited has any shadecloth last year.. no prob. got what i needed. but this year. they are not carrying it? i wanted to make a shade house for my phals and other orchids for outside as they do well in the summertime.. all i can find is 8 x16 foot bolts of bamboo reeds in a roll that you open up for shade etc.. is that enouhg to shade my orchids? how do i find out . i did get some. and the sunlight looks similar as if it has gone throuhg regular shade cloth.

I've thought about that before. I think the light should be okay. Should be a cool experiment.

beelady do you have access to a light meter?

beelady. The bamboo blinds should work ... with several "however's".
The blinds will probably cast more shade than 50% shade. Since it's summer, you have lots of light, so that shouldn't be a problem. The bamboo itself will hold up, however, the stitching is probably not uv resistant (ultra violet from sunlight) & will probably break down after a while, leaving you with individual strips of bamboo. Also blinds are meant to hang vertically, not horizontally, so they will sag of their own weight in the middle (like we all do at some time). And the weight will help break the stitching. So you will need to support the blinds in several places, crosswise.

IF YOU REALLY CARE about the amount of light, everyone has some kind of light meter ... your camera. All you care about is that the shade is similar to the shade cloth you already have. The camera experts can tell you how to get a more precise reading from your camera, but here's a crude method. If you have a camera with manual adjustments, set the focus to matrix so that you will get an averaging over the screen surface. Then set the camera to a fixed aperature, point toward the known percentage (50%) shade cloth & read the shutter speed. Then point at your suspended blinds & compare the readings.

If you have some scraps of shade cloth, you can do more. Suspend the second layer about 6" below the top layer & point your camera. It will give you a reading for 75% SHADE NOT 100% shade. (The first layer of 50% shade blocks 50% of the sun's light and allows 50% light to pass through. The second 50% layer blocks 50% of the available light ... 50% shading of 50% available light = 25% final available light. So The total shade is 75% and the total available light is 25%). So now you have readings for 50% shade & 75% shade. You can then compare the bamboo's shade ... which is probably somewhere in between.

You can also use a point & shoot digital camera. Point & half click & the screen will display a fixed "F" number, with a variable shutter speed (1/8, 1/10, 1/11, etc) Do the same comparisons.

All of this will only tell you how your screen compares to a known shade %age screen. But that's all you need ... or don't care to know. Personally, I would look some more for shade cloth.

I have seen some online places sell bamboo reeds like you mentioned as shadecloth alternatives. maybe you can check online. Also, I've seen pics online of lath houses using this stuff.

Why not order shade cloth from online?

Ordering Shade Tree shade cloth and shade fabric

Discount Shopping at CatalogClearance.com

BTW, I built a few shade structures, one with bamboo, another with PT wood. Neither fully satisfy my in my needs. I even added shade cloth on to of the PT wood one.

Here's why.. as the sun rotates over, there may be jus a little of pure light coming thru, but it's 100% and enough to burn my chids. The wood is 6" wide and spaced 1" apart. The was s'posed to give me about 70% shade, but it was definitely a fail. I added the shade cloth to the left half.
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...PT_Pergola.jpg

The bamboo structure is under two coconut palms and housed my vandaceous plants, so it's good.
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...oo_pergola.jpg