Blackout Blind at the rear of the Showroom
As part of our showroom refit, we were faced with the task of rejuvinating a broken curtain rail and noisy motorised blackout blinds. The Curtain rail suffered a broken cog where the motor drives the drivebelt, and annoyingly, Silent Gliss, the manufacturers would only offer a complete new rail system, rather than just a spare drive cog. This proved very costly, and as the curtain drive was noisy to start with, we decided to go with a new alternative motorised rail system from Becker Motors.
Once we figured out that the drive for the Silent Gliss system was not a standard 4-wire system, so we couldn’t just swap the wires over, the new curtain track worked a treat – quiet as a mouse, slow startup and stop, doing just what we wanted. The Silent Gliss system was a “Wave” system, which has a string joining each of the curtain runners, so they are spaced equally. This will have to be created separately, so the curtains look as they did before, so there’s a little bit of work to do yet.
The Blackout Blinds were equally expensive to get replacement motors for. One blind in particular was making particularly interesting grinding noises, and the others were just noisy. The original plan was to take the blinds off the old rollers, replacing the roller and motor, and “engineering” the new rollers and motors into the old casings. On inspection however it, was easier to adapt the old roller to fit the new motors, which work a treat – the only annoyance being access to the end-point adjustment was a little bit awkward.
Overall phase 1 to our showroom update is a success: see the Video below.