Shutters that won’t shut

When the last windows were installed the cable for the motor for the patio windows was switched to be close to the electricity. But, unfortunately, I didn’t have the right connectors to be able to do so.

Once I was able to connect the shutters I discovered that the wiring possibly wasn’t quite right. Once I’d reversed brown and black as I’d learned, I got some movement, but only on one side. Assuming it was me,I disconnected everything and left it at that.

The next morning, as the weather started to turn nasty, I got a call from our electrician that he’d be able to come round because of the weather. So I left him to it, because I had an appointment in town.

When I got home everything was connected up and the cables were in the wall - we’re now proud owners of 10 metre of cable tunnel even if we only needed a about a metre - but only one side of the shutters had closed.

The motor was working fine, so it had to be something else. I was able to pull the other side down so it was obviously sticking somewhere. Not something I could fix. I disabled the automatic control and dropped a quick email to Mr Loock our glazer, asking him to call.

The next afternoon two of the glazers came round to look at the shutters. After opening the box they discovered that the shutter had been overwound causing the connecting cables or “springs” to break. I think this is good design: if anything is likely to break, it’s the cables which are cheap and easy to replace unlike the drum, motor or shutters themselves.

The springs were quickly replaced, though as you can see one is shorter than the other, this causes the shutter roll faster which is why one side is shorter than the other.

However, this didn’t solve the problem: the shutter wouldn’t descend properly, something was obviously pressing on the case with tolerances of just millimetres.

We agreed they’d come back once we’d fixed whatever was causing this: on the outside it’s only a bit of polystyrene and above the box it’s just insulation.

We disabled the automatic control for the shutter but could use it as long as we were careful how high we let it go. With storms forecast for the weekend we were happy with that.

The storms were severe and it seems like there might be a bit of gap between the two doors. Though at the moment I’m not sure if I closed it properly. Note to self: the door handle needs to point up.

The storms came and we were had no problems apart from a little wind.

But the Monday after the storms Mr Loock rang to tell me they’d been working all weekend dealing with the storm damage and that, unfortunately, one of the glazers had broken a wrist and that all appointments were on hold.

Again our problems, no matter how annoying, were given a bit of perspective.

We had similar problems last week with the shutters at the front of the house but this time we knew what to test for and when I found a problem with kitchen on Tuesday, Ivan knew what to do and when we tested it on Thursday everything was fine.

Getting this right is difficult because the surfaces are so uneven. This is, after all, why we had problems fitting the windows. We need to insulate above the boxes and leave no gaps, but obviously the plastic can’t bear any weight. I think we’ll get there in the end.