Introducing The "Mini"

Many of our customers have inquired about motorizing their existing roller shades (retrofit), and we decided to meet the challenge. The latest member of our tubular motor family is our miniature 18 mm tubular motor series. You can use it to add a motor to existing roller blinds and shades.

Anytime you have a roller tube with an inside diameter of 18 mm or greater (about 3/4"), our mini motor will do the job. It also fits standard 1" aluminum tubing, if you want to make your own custom size shades. Or just pick up a new blind at your local hardware store; we found that Home Depot has a good selection of affordable roller shades.

With a mighty lift capacity of 4 lb (1.8 kg) with a 1" tube, these little wonders can take on a room full of windows with standard size roller shades and turn them into a co-ordinated motor driven system with our multi-channel remote controls.

Making miniature electronic devices is actually more expensive than standard sizes, but we have managed to keep the cost ($US 99 - motor, brackets, adapters only) within the same range of our other motors.

They are also suitable for use in a dual shade system that makes it possible to deploy two different shade types, depending on light conditions and room usage.

If your home theater projection system requires blackout conditions, you could deploy opaque shade material.

If it's bright outside, you could deploy tinted solar film on one of the rollers. If you want privacy, you could deploy translucent shade material.

The 18 mm mini motors require about 1.25" (32 mm) of horizontal space (1" OD tubing + 1/4" roll wrap space), so you need less than 3 inches (76 mm) of frame depth to accommodate a dual roller system side by side. If you use the vertical offset roller arrangement, you can do it with a frame depth of approximately 2" (50 mm).

We have put together some special starter kits in our online store that include evything you need to add a motor to blinds and shades:

Single Shade Starter Kit

Double Shade Starter Kit

Our remote controlled tubular motors can be set for reverse operation so that you can organize the motorized shade roller positions however you like.

The motors can be installed in either the left or the right side of the roller tube and each one can be programmed to go in the opposite direction when you hit the 'up' or 'down' switch on the remote.

You could easily set up a multiple window configuration where all the shades of one kind would retract simultaneously (going up), and all the shades of another kind could be deployed simultaneously (going down).

Some typical dual shade arrangements are shown above (left to right): dual shades side by side, dual shades with vertical offset, dual shades with vertical opposed rollers, triple horizontal (go crazy with three shades!), 14 channel remote.

Each blind can be assigned a different channel, but you can also 'group' the shade operation. The first blind in each window can be assigned to one group, and the second shade of each window can be assigned to a different group.

So if you had, for instance, some tinted solar film material on your roller in each of 3 adjacent windows, you could make all three shades of that type deploy at once. Channel 1 might be a blackout shade, channel 2 might be solar film, and chanel 3 could be a translucent shade.

Buy our special value starter kits here and save:

Single Shade Starter Kit

Double Shade Starter Kit

We also have very affordable wireless sun sensor (or day/night) triggers, and wireless programmable timers.

We sincerely hope you enjoy using these advanced motors; if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at any time!