3 Reasons You Should Choose Electric Rooflight Blinds Over Crank-Operated
Crank-operated rooflight blinds are a budget-friendly and practical choice for the public sector. But the reality of operating them doesn’t quite live up to the expectation.
Before we discuss the reasons to choose a motorised blind over a crank-operated one, let’s look at the positives of gear operation! The main one is that crank-operated blinds don’t need power to run as it’s a manual system, so they can be retrofitted without any extra carpentry or plastering needed to install wiring. This makes them a good option for projects that might have a very tight budget or that need to be completed quickly.
Crank-operated blinds tend to be cheaper than a motorised rooflight blind too because you don’t have to pay for the motor or controls, e.g. remotes. Even without taking into account the installation costs if you needed to install wiring, a manual blind will still be cheaper than a motorised one 99% of the time.
Crank-operated rooflight blinds are also inherently child safe as they don’t have any hanging chains or cords. The same applies to motorised blinds. This means they can be used in places like schools or colleges with peace of mind.
So those are the main positives, but why shouldn’t you use a crank-operated rooflight blind? Let’s discuss!
The Downsides of Crank-Operated Rooflight Blinds
Slow Operation
The gear on a rooflight blind is usually on a 6:1 ratio or similar. This means that for every 6 turns of the crank handle, your blind tube is only turning once. To put this into real terms, on a 3m long rooflight blind you would need to turn the crank handle at least 88 times to open or close the blind once!
Just think about how long that would take you to open or close your blind. Now imagine you had more than one rooflight that needed to be operated daily – it would practically need to be someone’s full-time job!
If the user experience is important to you, stick to a motorised solution.
Heavy
Rooflight blinds are highly tensioned to keep the fabric taut and sitting flat. This means that there is a lot of resistance pulling against the fabric. On our KuroLok RL system, we use two 4kg tension units per blind. That’s 8kg of tension being applied to the fabric.
Now imagine you have to not only turn the crank handle 88 times to open your blind but there’s also 8kg of tension working against you. The major downside of crank-operated rooflight blinds is how heavy and cumbersome they are to operate, to the point that many people might even find them inoperable. But on the plus side, you can probably cancel your gym membership!
Aesthetics
Crank handles are built to be safe and robust, but they were not designed with aesthetics in mind.
Plus, if you’re using a crank handle for your rooflight, you will have the handle attachment hanging down from the blind at all times, even if the handle itself can be removed and stored elsewhere.
Crank handles also usually have lots of plastic parts that only come in standard colours, normally white and black. This might be fine if your blind matches these colours but if you were getting your blind powder coated to a specific RAL colour to match your ceiling, for example, these plastic components would stay white and would stand out.
Wherever possible, we always recommend that rooflight blinds are motorised. Not only does it look better, but the user experience is so much greater, and the extra effort of adding wiring is worth it in the long run.
Want to find out more about motorisation and automation?
Check out our full range of rooflight blinds by clicking below!