Awnings near you

On a north-facing window in the southern hemisphere, the summer sun is high and the winter sun is low. A horizontal projection above the glass — an eave, a hood, a fixed awning — intercepts the high summer sun and lets the low winter sun pass beneath it. That is why the fixed awning works so well on the north and why its depth can be calculated rather than guessed.

On a west-facing window the sun arrives low, late and hot, at exactly the hour the house is already at its warmest. A horizontal projection is almost useless against it because the sun is coming in nearly horizontally. What works on the west is something that drops down the face of the glass: a straight-drop awning, an external blind, an adjustable louvre. East-facing glass has the same geometry in the morning, though the consequences are milder because the house starts the day cool.

The mistake this explains is the very common one of buying the same style of awning for every window on the house. The orientation should pick the type, and a supplier who asks which way each window faces before quoting is doing the job.

An awning presents a large surface to the wind at the end of an arm, and the load it transmits back into the wall is much larger than its weight suggests. The National Construction Code deals with wind actions on housing through its structural provisions, and classifies a private garage, carport, shed or the like as a Class 10a non-habitable building while a house is Class 1a; an awning attached to a house is part of that Class 1a building rather than a separate structure.

The practical consequences are about fixings. A folding arm awning bolted into brick veneer has to reach something that can carry it, and the brick skin of a veneer wall is a cladding rather than structure. On lightweight cladding the arms have to land on studs or on a continuous timber or steel backing installed for the purpose. Ask the installer, before they quote, what they intend to fix into and how they will confirm it is there.

In cyclonic parts of Australia this is not a detail but the whole question, and any external attachment in those regions needs to be specified for the wind region it is in rather than bought from a national catalogue.

Whether an awning needs approval depends on your state's planning rules and on the awning. Many states allow minor attachments to a dwelling as exempt development within stated size, height and setback limits, but the limits, the categories and the exclusions are set by each jurisdiction and change. Heritage listings, bushfire prone land and flood-affected land commonly remove the exemption, and an awning that projects over a boundary or over a public footpath is a different question again.

Strata and community title add a separate approval. An awning on the exterior of a unit is generally attached to common property, which means the owners corporation or body corporate has to agree, usually by a formal resolution with conditions about maintenance and future removal. Doing this after installation is far more expensive than doing it before. Check your state planning portal and, if you are in strata, your by-laws before ordering.