Motorized Blinds

Blindster.com has some very affordable motorized shades

I have the ikea ones tied in with my home automation. They do well, but the buttons they come with are shite. Recharge the battery every year or so.

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I have the ikea ones tied in with my home automation. They do well, but the buttons they come with are shite. Recharge the battery every year or so.

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same but i had one shade break recently.

i pulled it apart since i don't have an IKEA close by to see if I could repair it but there's no hope. these are designed to be thrown away if the string snaps. its going back to IKEA as soon as I can get back to the store. hell i guess i'll buy a spare this time to save time in the future if one dies.

having said that, i LIKE the buttons they came with. i have the tredansen cellular shades and they are insanely cheap ($159/window) compared to everything i looked at including CHY-NAH products on amazon.

the trick with the button is to throw away the battery they are shipped with and put in a good LiON button. i haven't had any issues with the remote after that.

again, you get what you pay for with IKEA. don't expect a user-serviceable product here.

also 2 important caveats here:

1. IKEA recalled the tradfri hub so you can't turn on true automation until the new hub ships to the US sometime later this year.

2. if you think IKEA automation sucks and would rather handle it with a different hub, the gen4 alexa has zigbee support built-in and you can pair it and use it with the hub *HOWEVER* the buttons will no longer work. This was a deal-breaker for the BIG BOSS so i'm patiently waiting for the new shite IKEA hub this fall.


ETA here's a video of my IKEA shades to give you an idea of:

* the noise they make going up/down
* the length of time it takes to go up or down (about a minute for a 70" long window)
* how 'in sync' they stay going down
* using the button (mounted to the wall)
* my windows at 35" x 70"

CADshades

Blending in with the existing window frames (mounted inside)



Upstairs



ETA, hell here's my entire post from reddit where I discussed this before purchasing. I put in more details regarding form/fit which is an important factor in making a decision since these are "off the shelf" and not sized to order.

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I originally bought 6 FYRTUR roll-up blinds and was so unhappy with the results I did not even take any photos. The walls and window trim of my house are all white and while there is a pretty good recessed 'box' frame the FYRTUR head still protuded an obnoxious amount and the height of the head also blocked part of the window. Because my windows are standard (US) at 35" (89cm) the roller blinds of the FYRTUR also did not block light properly because the material of the blinds was only 32 1/4" (82cm) while the TREDANSEN is almost the same width as the housing at 33 3/4" (85.7cm)! (I posted all the details of the measurements of TREDANSEN v FYRTUR in a thread a couple weeks back on here.) By comparison the TREDANSEN was night and day different! If you have 35" (89cm) width windows, these are the smart shades for you.

Also, I have been researching shades for awhile and even had a set of custom shades from 2 different companies in my cart on Amazon but even buying from China, these came out to be much more expensive; around $300 per window based on my window size. The nice thing about IKEA is if you can find one that matches you window width, you don't have to worry about height since they will work for almost any length.

Having said all of that, so far I'm extremely happy with the TREDANSEN. I don't have a hub yet so I can't speak to that but aside from a few quirks setting up the wireless remotes (I have one downstairs controlling 4 shades and one upstairs controlling 2 shades) everything went as expected. Protip: Go ahead and pull all the plugs and batteries out when you get home and start charging the batteries at the same time because you'll be done hanging the shades waaaaaaaay before the batteries finish charging. Doing the batteries one-at-a-time would have taken forever.

Anyway, so far so good, I made a little video showing how long it takes to lower the shades on a 70" (178cm) window so you can get an idea of that as well. It takes close to a minute but I'm not too worried about that since these are only going up and down maybe once a day.

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