motorized blinds - experiences?

[jpcjguy]

It is time to get new shades. The back of the house faces east so morning sun requires shades to be down.
I am looking to do a screened porch that will cover these windows but current economic conditions might pause that a bit. However my wife wants new blinds regardless as these are truly falling apart (agree with her). Trying not to spend a fortune, as the porch roof might alleviate a lot of the sun.
Motorized would be cool but with the amount of windows and size, I see the cost rising quickly.
Not against the cheap slat style as we manually up and down them now and it is not a big deal. I will compare the price difference and if the spread is not too bad I might consider upgrading - but looking for anyone that did any of these "mail order" blinds and your experience with them
Attached are pics of the kitchen and living room windows. There is also a side window and an upper window in the door between the kitchen and living room....

thanks!

 

[allinon72]

For our basement renovation we installed Smart Wings blinds. Opted for the hard wired version with HomeKit capability so I can control them via my AppleTV. They were NOT cheap and I had a really hard time clicking that buy button...but they've been good so far. With this type of product there is a lot of junk out there so be wary of that.

The highest end with motorized blinds is definitely Lutron but that was way out of my price range.

 

[pbon]

We have them and my wife loves them. I could manage without them — as people have done for a hundred years or more. The good ones are expensive — ours are Hunter Douglas wood slats. If you just open and close once a day, the battery charge can last a year. A bit of a pain to recharge.

 

[Rusted Nut]

My in-laws have a living room that faces west. They had some sun shades installed on the exterior. Shades cut the bright light, but you can still see out. That set up was less costly than new interior motorized blinds. They’ve been installed for about 6 years, and have weathered well. Not sure brand. Just another option. We installed Lutron throughout a new school we built a few years ago, haven’t had a single call back on them; not cheap however.

 

[kbuhagiar]

We have the Hunter Douglas 'Duette' motorized blinds installed throughout our house here in sunny Escondido. The programmed opening and closing of the shades is a real benefit, as it helps to keep our cooling costs down, and also helps to control fading of furniture and flooring.

The cost was eye-watering - we have 34 windows - but we felt it to be a buy-once-cry-once situation, and was easier to justify with our ten-foot ceilings. Three years counting and so far we've had zero problems. The PowerView software is user-friendly, and although each shade requires 12 "AA" batteries (yes, that's a total of 408 "AA" batteries) they only need replacing on average every 20-24 months.

 

[manwithtools]

For your setup, I would get one motorized blind for each "bank" of windows. That would help keep the cost down. On our last house we had Costco blinds do it. It was not inexpensive at all. We had huge windows that allowed sun at the worst times. We programmed them to open and close at the right times of day, sometimes partially open. It really helped our cooling costs. It would have been a pain to manually every day, lots of big windows.

Check out Blinds.com to get an idea of pricing.

 

[jayoldschool]

I ordered straight from Aliexpress, added wifi to bluetooth module. Easy, works perfect. Voice control on Google, scheduling, etc. Rechargable, not battery. Took some research to get exactly what I wanted. Bought for roller blinds, and a set for curtains.

https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-moes-blind-motor.html

 

[clutchee]

Office I used to work at had them.

The motor units had 2AA batteries, needless to say battery cost added up quickly.
If they were hard wired I could see that being nice.

Over was nice when in office to have them open and close as day passed.

 

[walta]

The Ikea motorized ones seem to get good reviews and have a lower price tag but you give up the custom sizing. If you can live with a less than one inch gap each side. The Ikea manual roller shades have been fine. We updated a few windows with Bally pleated shades with a loop looked great but the loop was impossibly slow and hated them. Blinds.com upgraded us to top down bottom up for the cost differential.

Walta

 

[gizardlizard]

Second vote for Smart Wings. We’ve had a pair of them in our bedroom for two years now with zero issues. Just placed an order for four more for our basement. The only negative I could comment on, is the fact that they are not as quiet as the Lutron’s. For the price though, I’m not complaining. They ran us about 400 bones per shade. The Lutron’s were over double that.

 

[jpcjguy]

Thanks for all the insight. Considering I am looking at 11 windows (4 can be condensed into 2 shades), I think motorized is off the table at this time. I think we are going to go with basic faux wood shades for now. Can get them all done for about $550. Worst case down the road we can redo. Just no idea what the light will be when a screen porch roof covers them all. Best think to keep the investment small to start....

 

[PT Doc]

When we repriced Hunter Douglas motorized blinds they were about 3x cost of fixed. How long does the east sun come through those windows? I wouldn’t get motorized, just more stuff to fail.

 

[jmiller_2308]

Hunter Douglas with power view hub *****! You need the hub to integrate with other home automation (Google assistant, home assistant, etc.) and the darn hub has so many software issues it regularly goes offline. I also hate that HD requires you go through their people to buy and install. This is seemingly to ensure you get the correct size. Well my guy messed up bad and it took most of a year to get fixed and after he admitted he messed up practically demanded that I give him a 5 star review.

I like the sheer blinds that have vanes to darken or open with the shade down to give filtered light, Also, if you have tall windows or don't like having cords or other opening devices the motorized is really nice.

 

[rsparks64]

If you go the motorized route, carefully consider whether you want battery or electric. You will need to change the batteries and should consider your ability to go up and down a ladder, how high the windows are, etc. If you are young and healthy, no big deal. Our indoor shades are manual but we have motorized shades/sunscreens (3 on the patio and one on our pavilion). We love the electric sunscreens. As you and others have mentioned, the price for motorized jumps significantly and may shock you.

 

[gizardlizard]

Our motorized blinds are rechargeable via USB. Using them twice daily, they only need to be charged once every 8 months.

 

[whateg01]

If you go the motorized route, carefully consider whether you want battery or electric.

Are your batteries air or hydraulic?

 

[rsparks64]

Are your batteries air or hydraulic?

No batteries. It is electric.

 

[58Yeoman]

We had ours in the kitchen and dining room replaced with new ones today. The brand is Solar Shield, and we like them a lot, and they're rechargeable. We had the honeycomb shades for just over five years, and some stink bugs got into a couple honeycombs and stained the. Tried cleaning and made it worse, so we got new straight design. Kitchen is two casement windows, while the dining has one center fixed with a casement on either side. Installed was around $1300.

 

[Skooterj]

My problem is I have blinds I really like, but Bali doesn't make my color anymore and I want to replace 2 of them with Motorized blinds. My wife opens and closes the ones in our bedroom almost every day during the summer. I actually want them to open during the winter as they face South. I need 2 new blinds to put into my recently completed detached garage, and plan on moving the ones from my bedroom out there (every window in my house is the same size, on purpose). But I don't want a mismatched color in my bedroom. I looked into motorizing my current blinds, but Bali says its not possible. But man, the automation looks amazing.

 

[Paycheck]

I’ve been looking at Smart Wings, but Lutron has a new cheaper version as well.

 

[jmiller_2308]

Adding to "spam acccount" comments is just the shear convenience of motorized blinds will mean that you will likely actually open and close them more often.

For example, we replaced all our windows last year and the new windows were just slightly smaller inside dimensions which then required replacing all our existing window treatments. After the huge costs of the windows we only replaced blinds in the main living space including adding strategic motorized blinds for windows we used most frequently. For the other windows I was able to cut down and modify the previous cellular blinds that were corded.

As we lived with the motorized shades and then added some automation the reality of manually pulling cords for 4 blinds in the recreational area of the house quickly got old. Although the first motorized blinds by HD are nice the experience of dealing with the dealer and the issues I had getting them to work along with the HUGE $ upgrade made me want to avoid HD forever. I was dubious of smart wings and other online blinds but when I got an add for Yoolax blinds while struggling with yet more broken cords on the manual shades I decided to give them a try. I ordered 1 blind to see what it was like and was satisfied enough to order the remaining 3 to cover the rec area. Cost wise I suspect I got everything for 1/3 what HD would have been and I actually got them months faster than HD. Installation wasn't hard and the remote worked straight out of the box.

The only issues I have had were trying to automate things. The HD blinds required a gateway to be able to automate anything other than a simple timed schedule. The gateway was proprietary and ridiculously expensive for what it was not to mention the thing is incredibly flaky going offline and forgetting its brains from time to time. The HD experience pushed me to get the Yoolax blinds with a matter controller. This being my first foray into matter/thread I had some additional growing/learning pains including buying yet more hardware which ultimately is open technology and cheaper than the proprietary HD solution. Everything works great now and because the rec area blinds are now motorized they actually get used!!!!

 

[NUTTSGT]

Adding to "spam acccount" comments is just the shear convenience of motorized blinds will mean that you will likely actually open and close them more often.

. . . .

Please don't quote or reference spam accounts.

This thread has had 4 different spammer post and link their **** in it.

 

[jmiller_2308]

Please don't quote or reference spam accounts.

This thread has had 4 different spammer post and link their **** in it.

Argh... I didn't realize when I responded to the now deleted post that the post came from a "spam account". When I used the @name reference their name was properly added to my post and I see now that that reference has been replaced by "spam account".

I'm all in favor of not propagating spammers - how should I have known that the previous post was a spammer?

As for my post above, I still stand by it and hope that by posting my experience with motorized blinds that it will help others. My post contains nothing from the spammer's original now deleted post other than an attribution which has now been replaced by "spam account".

 

[NUTTSGT]

Argh... I didn't realize when I responded to the now deleted post that the post came from a "spam account". When I used the @name reference their name was properly added to my post and I see now that that reference has been replaced by "spam account".

I'm all in favor of not propagating spammers - how should I have known that the previous post was a spammer?

As for my post above, I still stand by it and hope that by posting my experience with motorized blinds that it will help others. My post contains nothing from the spammer's original now deleted post other than an attribution which has now been replaced by "spam account".

You don't know, you can only make a SWAG.

Some key signs of it being a spammer,

Their first post and it contains a link.

First post and it's brings back an old thread....sometimes seriously necro thread.

Long time member with a handful of posts that hasn't posted for years. All of the sudden, they start posting again with links or recommendation of products. Generally, this means an account has been hacked.. . . currently, this is what has been happening in the last week or so.


If you see something that looks weird or out of place, just report and tell us what you see. The Mod staff or Ryan will look at it further and make a determination. If you quote a spammer and they get banned/post deleted, unless it's spotted, their link will still stay in the quote.

No harm, no foul. The Admin staff can't see everything and a little help from the members can go along way and is appreciated.