A surprising number of the calls we take start with a chain. There is a blind on a window four metres up a gable somewhere, the chain broke years ago or was never reachable to begin with, and the blind has sat in exactly the same position ever since. Which I do understand. Motorisation got sold for years as a luxury extra with a luxury price attached to it, so people quietly learned to live without. We went the other way on this a long time back. Every blind leaving our factory is motorised, full stop, that is simply the standard build, because after enough years of putting blinds into gables and stairwells and roof lanterns I genuinely could not tell you how a chain was ever meant to serve those windows.
What you actually get, and what it sounds like
The motors come from Somfy and they tuck away inside the top rail, so you never actually see one. You barely hear them either. The fabric moving is most of the noise you get, which surprises people who were expecting something more industrial. Day to day you use a remote, or a wall switch, whichever suits the room better. Or you put the whole house onto one app and set up timers and scenes, blinds coming down as the sun swings round in the afternoon, going back up with the morning alarm, that sort of arrangement.
If the place already runs Alexa, or Google Home, or one of the installed systems, Control4 and KNX and Crestron being the ones we meet most often, then the blinds just join in with whatever is already there. They do not turn up demanding an app of their own. The integrators we work alongside would not stand for that, and frankly neither would we, because I have been in too many houses where every subsystem arrived with its own little remote and the entire collection ended up in a kitchen drawer that nobody ever opens.
Something worth saying about the remote itself. People picture a plastic wand with fifteen buttons on it, and that was fair enough fifteen years ago. What we fit now is usually a small wall mounted switch that looks like a light switch, plus the app for anybody who wants it. In a bedroom I would put a switch by the bed and be done. In a big open room I would set two or three scenes and never touch a control again, because the honest truth about automation is that the best version of it is the one you stop thinking about.
The windows where electric stops being optional
Then there are the windows where electric is not really a choice at all, and this is most of what we actually do.
A triangle or a gable end simply will not take an off the shelf blind, so those get SonaApex instead, made to the measured angles of that one particular window. The mechanism that holds the fabric tight against the sloped edge, the light gap control, is the part we hold the patent on. But reach matters here every bit as much as the shape does, and that gets overlooked. An apex window is nearly always high up, over a stairwell or at the top of a double height room, and a manual blind in that position is really a blind that somebody has to go and fetch a ladder for. Nobody fetches the ladder. I have never once seen anybody fetch the ladder. So the blind stops moving.
Glass overhead is a different problem again. Gravity works against the fabric up there rather than for it, so our electric skylight blinds run in tensioned tracks down each side and stay flat against a lantern at any pitch you like. An ordinary blind fitted overhead sags by the end of its first summer, and we have replaced plenty of them for people who found that out the hard way.
And then there are the normal windows in between, which get our honeycomb cellular blinds. Those come in two builds and the choice between them is duller than it sounds, 25mm does everyday sizes perfectly well, and we go to 45mm when the drop is tall enough that a thinner cell would start bowing out in the middle on you. Those are motorised as standard as well, and there is a safety argument sitting alongside the convenience one that I think gets underplayed. A looped cord on a tall window in a house with small children is a hazard, and the regulations around them did not appear out of thin air. Take the cord away altogether and the problem leaves with it.
A job that explains the whole thing better than I can
There was a house near Sevenoaks a couple of winters ago that I still think about when this comes up. Double height sitting room, gable end glazing the whole way up, and a manual blind on the lower half that the owners used constantly. The apex above it had nothing. They had been quoted for a blind up there years earlier, decided against it on cost, and then spent every summer evening since with the sun coming through that triangle straight into the television.
What they had not worked out, and what nobody had explained, was that the reason they had rejected it was not really the blind. It was that the quote assumed somebody would be operating it, and there is no operating a blind at that height. So the whole thing had been priced as a compromise that was never going to get used anyway.
We put a shaped blind across the apex and put it on the same remote as the lower one. The owner told me afterwards that the room had gained an evening. That is roughly the argument for all of this in one sentence, and it has very little to do with technology.
I mention it because the cost conversation nearly always happens the wrong way round. People compare a motorised blind against a manual one as though they do the same job. On a reachable window they very nearly do, and I would not push you either way. On a window nobody can reach, the manual one does no job at all, it just sits there looking like a blind, and the honest comparison is between a motor and an empty window.
Does it mean an electrician, and what about maintenance
One assumption worth knocking down while I am here. Motorised does not have to mean an electrician and a chased wall.
Most retrofit jobs run perfectly happily on battery motors. You charge them in place a couple of times a year and that is genuinely the entire maintenance story. The batteries live in the top rail, you drop the blind down, plug in for a few hours, and forget about it again until the app tells you otherwise. People are sceptical about this until they have lived with it for a year.
A new build, or a proper renovation, is another matter. Get mains or low voltage cable in at first fix while the walls are still open. It is tidier forever and there is no charging to remember at all. The cost of doing it at that stage is close to nothing, and the cost of doing it afterwards involves a plasterer. Both routes cross our fitting benches every week, so ask us and you will get a straight answer on which one your project actually wants rather than which one is easier for us.
As for reliability, which is the question everybody asks eventually and almost nobody asks first. Somfy are the industry standard for a fairly dull reason, which is that they keep working. What I would say is that the failures we actually get called out to are hardly ever the motor. They are the fitting. A bracket that was never quite square, or fabric cut for a window that somebody measured a bit optimistically. Which is a roundabout way of saying the survey matters rather more than the spec sheet does, though I accept that is an awkward thing to argue when you are the one selling the spec sheet.
Where to start if you are weighing this up
Weighing it all up for a house or a project? Photographs and rough window sizes sent to contact@sonashades.com is much the quickest route, and you will get a person rather than a form response.
If the honest answer for one of your windows turns out to be a plain battery roller, that is what we will tell you, and we will say so even though it is the least interesting thing we make. The awkward ones, the triangles and the gable ends and the lanterns, those are the windows we enjoy, and those are the ones where the motor stops being a nice extra and starts being the only sensible way the blind will ever get used.
