Motorised Blinds and Curtains: Battery or Wired, Somfy or Acmeda, and What It's Like to Live With

A motorised blind is an ordinary blind with a motor inside the tube instead of a chain on the side. You press a button, it moves. That's the whole idea — the decisions are about power (battery or wired), brand (Somfy or Acmeda), and how much control you want (a remote, an app, a schedule, your voice). Here's how we'd walk a friend through it.

A double roller behind a sheer on a track, at the Abercrombie house. These are the two products people motorise most: the roller for the daily up-and-down, the curtain track for a wall of fabric that's a pain to drag by hand.

What you can motorise

At Home Blinds Australia, the motor is an option you tick while you configure the product. Right now that's:

Our roman, venetian, vertical and panel blinds and our plantation shutters are manual — chain, wand or hinge. If you want a dark bedroom on a remote, a motorised blockout roller is the way to do it.

Battery or hard-wired?

For an existing home the answer is nearly always battery. For a house that's still at frame stage, tell your electrician where the blinds are going and run the cable — you'll never charge anything.

The motors we actually fit

We use two brands. Somfy is the French company that more or less invented the blind motor; their radio system is called RTS, and their newer motors talk Zigbee. Acmeda is an Australian hardware company whose motor range is called Automate. Both are quiet, both are reliable, and we've fitted a lot of each. The option list in the roller blind builder looks like this:

Somfy Sonesse 28 WireFree — battery, Zigbee

Somfy Sonesse 40 RTS — hard-wired

Acmeda Automate E6 — hard-wired, two-way

For curtains the choice is the Somfy Glydea track (battery or hard-wired, RTS remote) or the Acmeda Automate Versa drapery motor, which runs on either power source, starts and stops softly, and lets you tug the curtain to set it moving. You pick the track and motor in the curtain configurator.

Acmeda Automate Versa — runs on mains or a battery module

Where the motor lives: inside the tube, between the brackets

A bank of rollers like this is where a motor pays for itself. One remote channel moves all three at once instead of you working three chains one after the other.

Remotes, hubs, apps and voice

Every motor comes with a remote, and for a lot of people that's all they ever use. A multi-channel remote runs several blinds separately or together — bedroom on channel one, living room on two, everything on the "all" channel. Each motor also stores a favourite position: press once and it goes to two-thirds down, or wherever you set it.

If you want the blinds in an app, on a schedule or on your voice, you add a hub. Somfy motors pair with the TaHoma hub, which gives you scenes ("Good morning" opens the bedroom sheers and raises the living room rollers), sunrise and sunset timing, and control while you're away. Acmeda's Automate motors use Acmeda's own hub and app. Both connect to Google and Alexa for voice.

Two honest notes. First, the hub is a separate purchase, so budget for it if the app matters to you. Second, RTS is one-way radio — the remote talks, the blind listens — so an RTS blind can't report its position back to the app without the hub doing some bookkeeping. Zigbee and the Automate E6 are two-way, which is why the app can show you they're actually closed. In practice both work; it's a detail that matters more to the smart-home crowd than to anyone else.

Where a motor makes the most sense

A Somfy remote and a white motorised roller. Up, down, and the "my" button in the middle for your favourite position.

Installing a motorised blind yourself

It's the same job as a chain blind, plus about ten minutes with the remote. The brackets are the same, the measuring is the same, and our how-to guides cover both. The things that are different:

Motorised blinds are covered by the same five-year warranty as everything else we make. The Perfect Fit Guarantee is an optional paid add-on: we video call you to check your numbers before we make it.

Common questions