Configuration Dual Panel

Dual Panel (sheer + blackout)

Added in v2026.8.0.

Two independent shades hang over one window: a front sheer that filters daylight, and a back blackout that you want down for heat, for privacy after dark, or overnight. Before this cover type you either ran them as two unrelated Adaptive Cover Pro instances and hand-wrote automations to keep the blackout in step, or you gave up and drove the back panel manually.

The front panel sun-tracks exactly like a plain vertical blind — same geometry, same position limits, same pipeline. The back panel ignores sun tracking entirely and answers one question instead: is any of my triggers active right now? If yes it closes; if no it opens.

Not the same thing as a Day/Night Shade. That type has two fabrics on one mechanism sharing one track, so the rails are coupled and the middle can never pass the bottom. Here the two panels are genuinely independent — separate motors, separate entities, no ordering constraint between them. If your hardware is one shade with two fabrics, you want the day/night type.

Geometry settings

Variable	Default	Range	Description
Front (Sheer) Panel Entity	none		Which of this instance's covers is the front / sheer panel. Every other configured cover is treated as the back / blackout panel. Leave this unset and the instance runs as a plain vertical blind — nothing is coupled and no panel deploys.
Blackout Deploy Triggers	none selected		When the back panel closes. Any combination of Heat, Privacy, and Night. With none selected the back panel never deploys.

Blackout deploy triggers

Select any combination. The back panel closes while any selected trigger is active, and retracts as soon as none of them is.

Trigger	Fires when
Heat	Climate mode calls for a summer or extreme-heat full block. Needs Climate Mode configured — with climate off, this trigger never fires.
Privacy	The cover is inside its sunset window. Follows the same sunset configuration the rest of the integration uses.
Night	The sun is below the horizon.

Heat and Night are the pair most people start with: blackout down through the hot part of a summer afternoon, up again as it cools, down once more after dusk. Adding Privacy extends the evening close back to the sunset window rather than waiting for the sun to clear the horizon.

⚠️ Known limitation — Night and Privacy don't fire outside the operating time window. If you have set an End Time on the Automation step, regular update cycles stop after it, and the back panel's deploy decision isn't treated as a safety action that overrides that gate. A Night or Privacy trigger that only becomes active after the window closes is decided but never dispatched, so the blackout can sit open all night while the decision trace says "deploy". Heat is unaffected during the day.

Until this is fixed, either leave End Time unset on a dual-panel instance, or extend it past the point your Night/Privacy trigger becomes active. Tracked as #1001, with a strict xfail test pinning the gap.

What each panel does

The front panel is the one doing the interesting work, and it behaves like any other vertical blind — sun tracking, custom positions, manual override, climate, and every other pipeline handler apply to it normally. Read How It Decides for that chain; nothing about it changes here.

The back panel sits outside that chain. It is driven only by its triggers, so it is either fully open or fully closed and never lands somewhere in between. That also means it takes no part in the delta and interval gates that damp the front panel's movement — there is nothing to damp, since it only has two states.

See also

• Cover Types — how this type compares to the others
• Configuration-Day-Night-Shade — the coupled single-mechanism alternative
• Configuration-Vertical — the front panel's geometry settings