On high glazing, stair voids and multi-blind walls of glass, motorisation stops being a luxury upgrade and starts being the only practical way to open your blinds at all.
Rechargeable battery motors need no wiring and retrofit into an existing blind, charged every few months from a USB-style charger — the default for apartments, clusters and any home where re-wiring is a hassle. Wired 220V motors suit new builds and renovations: permanent, no charging, and the right choice for big or heavy systems and anything mounted outside, like external venetians, awnings and roller shutters. We'll recommend the right one for each window, not just one answer for the whole house.
It's the first question most Morningside households ask, so here's the honest answer: rechargeable battery motors keep working through an outage, because they're not drawing from the grid in the moment — you just need to keep them charged, load permitting. Wired systems go quiet without a backup power source, so if you're motorising a wired system, plan for it alongside an inverter rather than as an afterthought. We'll talk this through properly at your free measure.
Spans too wide or heavy for a chain, blinds above a stairwell or double-volume void, concealed ceiling-recess systems, and anything exterior — external venetians, folding-arm awnings, roller shutters. On an access-controlled estate where the household isn't always home to manually adjust blinds through the day, "one button, six blinds" is less a convenience and more the point.
Motorisation carries no separate price, because what you are buying is a product with a motor inside it. Across what is fitted here that works out at roughly R2,500 to R7,500 per square metre installed: a motorised roller blind at R2,500 to R3,800, a motorised roller shutter at R5,000 to R7,000, and a motorised folding-arm awning at R5,500 to R7,500 per square metre of projection.
Small openings are charged at a minimum whatever drives them, and a rechargeable battery motor retrofitted into a finished room is a different job from a wired motor planned into a renovation. Which one your home needs, and what each window comes to, is decided at the free measure and put in writing.
One remote or one app, whether it's controlling stairwell glass in Illovo, wide estate walls in Atholl, or floor-to-ceiling towers in Sandown. We fit and programme motorised systems throughout Morningside and into these neighbouring suburbs:
Free in-home measure, honest advice on battery vs wired, no pressure to decide on the day.
