Currently renovating a house that I will be moving into next summer. Starting to look into motorized blinds but I’m not sure I’m looking in the right places.
Since I am reno-ing, I would prefer hard-wired power (could be low or high voltage) over batteries. I currently have mostly ESPHome, Zigbee, and Zwave devices. I have some other cloud based stuff, but want to stay away from adding anything else cloud based if possible. So my preferred end product would be a hard-wired motorized blind (roller or slat) that can be ultimately controlled by HA via a local protocol (Zwave, Zigbee, Wifi to local API, etc)
Are there any recommendations on where to look for this sort of thing?
I have Lutron Sivoia QS Triathlon shades. They make them either with batteries (8 D-cell or 16 D-cell depending on width) or a power supply or a multi-shade power supply (supports up to 10). Then get a Lutron Caseta Pro Hub 2 and use the Lutron component for full local control once you enable telnet on the hub. Be forewarned though… these shades are expensive and so is the power supply. But breakeven cost point of the power supply over batteries I calculated in 2019 is about 32 years (average battery life is 3-5 years with an average cost of $1.80 per battery, total of 96 batteries in use). I have 8 shades, 4 with 16 D-cell batteries and 4 with 8 D-cell batteries. I just replaced the batteries in 2 of them that have 8 batteries and are 12ft long by 2ft wide after 3.5 years of service.
I recently acquired one of these pretty reasonably priced shades and they are absolutely fantastic battery operated Z-Wave shades. The battery is large capacity and I still haven’t shaved a single percent off after using them for about a month now (and they open/close multiple times a day).
I looked at Somfy but they are so expensive. These have been so impressive that I’m outfitting all my windows with them now.
I used to reccommend Graber / Somfy / Springs Window Fashions custom blinds From ZebraBlinds (the blinds are solid - more on that in a minute) the recommendation on the company was about service. That said unfortunately it looks like ZebraBlinds folded early this year so…
The Graber ZWave blinds (especially newer ones) are great build quality and there’s a few outfits in the US where you can custom order any size (reasonable, largest one I have is 72"x72") and material
Now one caution. The Bali brand is the same base blind built to OEM spec for retail box stores. The biggest difference in these blinds is support. Basically the support model for the retail ones is. Pray. That’s about it.
So I can recommend springs /Graber ZWave blinds IF you can find a good retailer for them now. No way would I buy them from a Home Depot or Menards - way too much money to risk a device not working due to bad firmware.
I’ve been using some from Leviosa (@Leviosa) for some time and they work / look nice. Unfortunately they don’t report position back, so I had to write some scripts based on where I ‘think’ the blinds are / custom positions and then change an input_select according to what action I’m passing to the blinds.
Lastly, a caveat w/ the Leviosa shades is their HA integration doesn’t work for me w/ Ubiquiti. An issue w/ HA being on a different VLAN than the Leviosa wireless controller and my Unifi system not correctly relaying or repeating or passing something b/w VLANs.
Because of this VLAN issue, I’m using their SmartThings integration to control. HA->SmartThings->Leviosa. Not local and less than ideal, but functional-ish. Nice blinds though.
I’ve also used (for Somfy blinds, fans, etc.) and Bond bridge in order to HomeAssistant-ize some other blinds / fans that were pre-installed in my home.
I went for wired Somfy back to Somfy relay controller. And used Sonoff (flashed ESPHome) to trigger the Somfy controller. It has been the most successful Home automation device as family have got used to Google hub voice commands to operate them. My family hates tech things!
Something must be wrong with your integration, I have the radio version of these shades and battery definitely goes down around 1% every day or other day
I will say I have been very impressed with Z-Wave’s ability to preserve battery life. So i guess if I have to go battery, Z-wave is the place to go. I just don’t want to have to go running around the house charging up my blinds every few months.
It is relatively easy to power a battery powered device from a mains powered block.
Just make sure that the voltage is about the same as the batteries and the ampere is equal or higher.
Once that is handled then it just require a wooden stick in the length just short of the batteries length and a screw in each end where to you connect the wires from the power block.
The screw can be used to adjust the length of it is too long or short.
The Graber/Bali/Somfy ZWave ones use a 10v cell. They have a dry cell chassis that just holds 8 AAs or you can get an upgraded LiPO cell (mine lasts about a year on a single charge in most cases)
They also have a 10v power supply intended to run power for them
In all cases on the Grabers, the connector is a USB micro. So you can always just make a 10v (i think 5a, check the manual) supply and tip it with a USB micro.
USB is 5V for any standard before USB3.2 (USB-C connector), so 10V through a micro-USB sounds suspicious.
Also micro-USB is normally USB3.1 or lower, which means a max of 2.4A, so 5A sound suspicious too.