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Motorised blinds recommendations?


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I’m looking into replacing three 2000mm x 2200 mm drop roller blinds with motorised ones.

Options out there are a bit confusing, but think I have figured out what I need:

Needs to be mains / hardwired with no remote as will be controlled by a z-wave switch.

Due to size of the blinds, at least 10Nm torque and 28 rpm.

Due to my poor cutting skills, ideally should come with blackout blind made to size.

 

Does anyone who has done this before have any recommendations of specs and/or suppliers?

If at all possible want to keep it under $1k for the three, excluding z-wave / sparky.

 

If the blinds were smaller I would certainly be going for low voltage DIY 3D printed / arduino / mqtt options, but they are not :-).

 

Thanks!

Dave

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  • 9 months later...

After nearly a year of multiple aborted attempts to find decently priced and featured blinds, I think I have finally found them.

Blinds online have a sale on (until tonight) and the three came to $800.

They are made to size and include battery powered motors, chargers and remotes (for $20 on sale but I just bought one).

Planning to use a broadlink RM pro + and an mqtt to broadlink bridge for Openhab / Alexa integration.

 

I’ll report on how it goes when they arrive but thought I’d post today incase anyone else is looking and wants to get in on the sale.

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Not a real fan of battery powered automation myself, battery backup yes and probably essential these days but solely powered off batteries that need to be charged, not really.

As with all automation I would check the unit has limit switches for when the automation does fail. Even though your units are battery powered, you can easily convert them to mains powered, battery backup.

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Not a real fan of battery powered automation myself, battery backup yes and probably essential these days but solely powered off batteries that need to be charged, not really.

As with all automation I would check the unit has limit switches for when the automation does fail. Even though your units are battery powered, you can easily convert them to mains powered, battery backup.

 

Agree entirely. I avoid battery powered automation completely generally.

In this case I just went for it due to price and just to get them in as the Mrs has been complaining about the current ones daily recently, and once they are working I will work on either conversion or solar/mains trickle charging.

I don’t think the units have physical limit switches - limits are set programmatically. All my automation will be doing is issuing an mqtt message that will in turn send an RF signal to simulate a remote button press.

 

 

 

 

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Agree entirely. I avoid battery powered automation completely generally.

In this case I just went for it due to price and just to get them in as the Mrs has been complaining about the current ones daily recently, and once they are working I will work on either conversion or solar/mains trickle charging.

I don’t think the units have physical limit switches - limits are set programmatically. All my automation will be doing is issuing an mqtt message that will in turn send an RF signal to simulate a remote button press.

 

 

 

 

Yep that sounds pretty good. Might want to swap the batteries out for Gel cells. Maybe one or two batteries sealed type gell cells to power all the blinds, 6 or 12 volt depending on what the operating voltage is from the existing batteries and then you can use a simple trickle charge battery charger plug pack to change it or them rather than metal hydride battery type chargers that needs to monitor the battery temperature as it charges this type of battery.

My Dytech front swing door operator uses this exact same system although it is all built in the operator. It has a 12 volt gell cell that powers the operator and a trickle charger wired in parallel to the battery so the operator and it's motor can pull high current, (5amps)..for the motor off the battery and the low powered trickle charger...200Ma simply tops the battery back up so a relatively small trickle charger is all that is required. You just have to make sure to charge the battery fully on initial installation so all the trickle charger ever does is top up the battery each time the unit is used and being only 200Ma, will never destroy the gell cell.

The added advantage is should the mains fail, the system continues to work off the battery so you get battery backup as well without any real dedicated battery backup electronics required.

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