After a few years of using Soma’s “Tilt” hardware and a lot of recent frustration, I think it’s time I look at other options. A bit of history here on my trials and tribulations with these things.
I initially got these for an apartment, and for the time they worked well. It had built in horizontal blinds across two large windows. As a renter, install was easy as a “retrofit”. The way my windows worked I found it best to place the tilt device on the upper part of the window glass itself and reverse the shade direction. I got the Soma Connect Hub (Raspberry Pi version) and paired it to Alexa. Took some effort, but I was overjoyed.
A year or so later, I moved into a home. I got my own horizontal blinds. The blinds I got sadly did not have a “reversed” configuration, so I had to mount the tilt devices on the side of my windows, which looked uglier. I found since the material I was mounting to was wood or drywall, the devices were hard to stick, or harder than with glass. Also, my blinds stuck out some from the window, so I ended up having to make my own spacers in order to push the tilter out from the wall, so the tilt cord wouldn’t tangle in the blinds. I had to order more of the tilt devices (more windows) and found I actually had some which were their V2. I noticed these held their calibration a lot better. I also got the U1 hub (more on that nightmare) and had graduated from Alexa backend to Hubitat. Overall, a lot more issues cropped up. Some windows wouldn’t turn as well. Some windows could use solar, some couldn’t. Some devices held battery better than others. I slowly had to convert to corded power for more and more of them. The U1 I resorted to using when it seemed distance between the Raspberry Pi hub and the tilters was causing an excessive battery drain. This added a host of problems as the U1 hub wasn’t supported by Hubitat at the time, and the API was different. I had to actually figure out API calls at this point. I got these MOSTLY working for a period of a year or two.
I recently graduated to Home Assistant. As with things in the past sadly, these finicky blind tilter seem to just degrade in utility and reliability any time I change something up. At first Home Assistant handled them like a champ. Then, about a month ago, I started to get a lot of strange errors and timeouts. At times, Home Assistant couldn’t get the blinds to respond at all. In attempts to fix that, I resorted to using the U1 hub. This completely upended everything! My blinds behaved oddly. After a day struggling with that, recalibrating, even exploring API call options, I came back to the Rasberry Pi hub. I don’t know why, but the U1 hub is just chaotic.
Sadly, there was a cost more than some of my sanity. I now have one tilter that won’t respond, not even connecting with the phone app. I’ve unplugged it to hope it will die and then I can reset, but that could take a LONG time. The other is on one of my longer windows, and it seems the poor motors just could barely handle it, and can’t now at all. I tried calibrating it and got to a point the small twists up or down do nothing to my blinds. They’re just too weak. I could push that button 100 times and the blinds won’t move.
All of this is to say, I think it’s time to throw in the towel on these things. I’m looking at options, and I think something that replacing the blinds entirely is the best way to go. Other tilting options on the market seem just as prone to all the issues I’ve had with the Soma products (solar power, battery power, calibration, etc.). Looking at options, Lutron has a few in their Serena series. It seems the costs are more “premium”, but I’m a firm believer in getting what you pay for. However, I don’t want to spend a lot of money only to learn I goofed on the various options I picked. I do not want to go battery/solar on power for these. Though I can run power via wall plugs, I’m not going to be able to wire power directly through the wall. It’s simply beyond my abilities. I already have a Lutron Cassetta Pro 2 hub for the Pico remotes, and that seems to integrate well with Home Assistant.
All of this said, can anyone offer advice on this plan? Am I not seeing other potential pitfalls?