Hallmark external blinds?

[Alan Ambrose]

For budgeting and decision making purposes, does anyone have a rough idea of the cost of these? Any other competitors you considered? How did you provide for inevitable maintenance? Dropping them down from their slot or somehow extracting them from the front? Did you bury the side channels in the window surround or leave them proud?

[Bramco]

@Alan Ambrose

 

We had ours installed over 3 years ago, so probably not worth comparing costs.  We did look around for other suppliers but they either didn't do what we were looking for or were much more expensive.

 

We didn't plan for maintenance....    But they've been in for a while now with no problems. I say no problems....   someone....  left one of the chairs on the patio under one of them and it wouldn't straighten by itself, so we got Hallmark out to fix it. They did explain how to rejig the tapes that do the up and downing by pushing buttons on the motors - although of course we've no idea now how to do that!!  You can see the motors when the blinds are down by looking up into the housing.

 

We didn't use cassettes but I did find some interesting lintels with cassettes built into them. Could probably still find these if you are interested.  Ours are built into a slot above behind the timberwork for the cladding. You can see this from the photos on our architects web page -> https://lhc.net/projects/ashcroft-creating-a-low-energy-family-home/

 

If you zoom in to the photo with the chairs outside, you can see that the side channels were attached to stands that were screwed into the frame of the sliding doors. So they are proud of the sides of the opening.

 

We are very pleased with them - they're great in the summer for reducing solar gain and from autumn to spring good at letting the solar gain in.

 

Hallmark are only a small outfit but apart from a few niggles we were pleased with them.

 

PS We used wired switches but in hindsight it might have been better to have a wireless system.

[Alan Ambrose]

Thanks for that. Reporting back after talking to Hallmark re their external ‘Trojan’ Venetians I’m learning that:

 

+ the blinds install from below into a 120mm slot so that would also be how you would replace them. Depth of slot is a function of how long the blinds are as the 80mm slats stack inside.

+ the vertical guide rails could be inset but often are mounted directly to whatever holds the window frame - in our case a ‘window box’ as we’re building a timber frame.

+ costs are about £0.7K for a 1x1m window to £1K for a 2m W x 2.3m H.

+ they sit on a 4-core cable. You can route that to their switch or back to your own fancy control system.