Roller Shutters And External Blinds

An external shutter or blind sits in the weather, carries moving parts, and gets operated twice a day. Very little else on a building takes that combination of loads.

So they fail, and they fail in a small number of predictable ways.

What actually goes wrong

The motor. Tubular motors have a duty cycle and a service life. They overheat if run repeatedly, and they eventually stop. A motor that runs, stops partway and refuses to restart for twenty minutes is thermally cutting out, not broken.

Limit settings drifting. The shutter stops short of the sill or tries to keep driving past it. That is a limit adjustment, not a fault, and it takes minutes if you know the motor.

The bottom rail out of square. One side runs ahead of the other, the slats bind, and forcing it bends the rail.

Slat damage. Aluminium slats dent easily. A dented slat jams in the guide and stops the whole unit.

Guides and tracks. Salt, dust and insects build up. On coastal buildings the guides corrode, which is the same exposure problem that drives [external painting](/blog/external-painting-and-when-to-repaint) cycles.

Remotes and controllers. Battery, pairing or a failed receiver. Diagnosed in a minute and frequently the whole problem.

The manual override matters

Every motorised shutter should have a manual release, and most tenants do not know where it is or that it exists.

On a security shutter over the only door or window, that is worth fixing on the day rather than the next visit. Showing the occupant the override and leaving the winder where it can be found turns a future emergency into an inconvenience.

Servicing is cheap and almost nobody does it

Cleaning the guides, checking fixings, lubricating the right parts with the right product and confirming the limits takes well under an hour per unit.

Done annually, it prevents most of the failures above. Left for five years, a set of shutters on a coastal building is frequently past repair.

Silicone spray and general purpose lubricants on the wrong parts attract grit and make it worse, which is why "we keep spraying it" usually arrives alongside a seized unit.

Repair or replace

Motors are replaceable and generally worth replacing on a unit in good condition.

Slats and rails are replaceable while the profile is still available, which on older units is the deciding factor. An obsolete profile means the whole unit.

Guides and the box are the expensive parts, so corrosion there usually ends the argument.

In strata

External shutters and blinds on a facade are typically common property or at least subject to by-laws, even when they serve one apartment.

Which means approval before installation and a clear position on who maintains what afterwards, the same [common property or lot owner](/blog/common-property-or-lot-owner-who-pays) question that governs everything on an external wall.

The practical advice for an agent

Log which units have motorised shutters and when they were last serviced. Batch the servicing across a building rather than calling it in one failure at a time.

Ample handles shutter and blind repairs alongside the other trades in the building, so a jammed shutter and the window hardware next to it are one visit rather than two.