DIY Motorized Blinds: The Best Products To Use - LinkdHOME

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Motorizing your blinds or other window shades allows you to add them into your smart home setup. This provides a great deal of utility when using schedules and scenes and can actually save a bit of time since you can operate all the blinds at once instead of manually moving them one at a time.

There are certainly good professional options for doing this like the Hunter Douglas PowerView system, or Lutron’s Serena Smart Shades. These are clean and reliable options, but can cost a lot to get made and installed. If you already have perfectly fine blinds or curtains, you may not want to throw them away on top of the high cost of the replacements.

Thankfully there is a range of products on offer that provide motorization for various window coverings you can install yourself, and for much less up front. There are, however, quite a few different approaches here, and you’ll need to consider blind size, smart home integration options, and how visible you want the ultimate solution to be.

Types of Smart Motorized Blind Controllers

Let’s start with looking at the methods available to automate your shades yourself. There is some variance here depending on if you have curtains, roller blinds, or some other type like Venetian or vertical blinds.

Roller Motors

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If you’re looking at roller blinds, you can potentially install powered rollers where the motor sits inside the tube. There are DIY options for these, but you’ll be looking at more installation effort than most other cases as you’ll have to remove and modify the rollers. Additionally, there aren’t many of these DIY motors that have any kind of smart home support, but I’ve managed to locate a couple of viable options.

Tilt Motors

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These devices provide the rotary control needed for opening tilt blinds like venetians and other horizontal types. These motors typically replace the wand used to manually control such blinds and can be either internally installed or mounted alongside the blind depending on the design.

Blind Engines

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These devices all utilize the existing cord or chain that your shades have for manual control by attaching to them and pulling the cord for you. These are the simplest to install, but typically the least attractive as the controller has to sit exposed on the wall. The added benefit to that is they often provide some manual controls there as well.