Blockout & Sunscreen Roller Blinds

The plainest blind on the list, and usually the right one

A roller is one flat panel of fabric on an aluminium tube. Nothing tilts, nothing stacks, nothing clatters when a doorway draught catches it. That plainness is the whole argument: on a window where the joinery, the garden or the room itself is already doing the talking, a roller gets out of the way in a manner a slatted blind never quite manages.

It also happens to suit the widest spread of housing we work in around here. Irene grew up around a working dairy farm, so the older streets run to whitewashed gabled cottages with deep stoeps and timber sash windows set into thick walls — and a roller drops inside a reveal like that without arguing with the frame. Ten minutes away, the estate houses are sliding stacks and picture windows measured in metres. Same product. Different bracket, different fabric, different conversation.

Blockout: what it does, and what it doesn't

Blockout cloth is coated so no light passes through the fabric itself. Bedrooms, media rooms, a study with a screen in it.

Two honest caveats before you assume that means pitch dark. Light will always find the gap around the edge of an inside-mounted blind, so a room that has to be properly black wants an outside mount with a generous overlap, or a side channel added. And the thermal benefit is real but modest — a blockout roller is one more still layer of air between the room and single glazing, which counts for something on a cold, dry highveld night in June, and counts for rather less than a cellular blind would in the same opening. We would rather tell you that than sell you a roller as insulation.

Sunscreen: the view stays, the glare goes

Sunscreen is a woven mesh with a stated openness figure. Three per cent and five per cent are the two we quote most. Lower number, tighter weave, more glare and UV held back, marginally less view through. On a north-facing lounge window looking out under the oaks, five per cent usually holds the balance; on a hard west elevation taking the full four o'clock sun, we would tighten it to three.

The thing worth knowing before you order it: sunscreen buys you daytime privacy only. After dark, with the lamps on inside, the effect runs the other way and the room reads clearly from the garden. On any window facing a street, a shared boundary or a neighbour's stoep, that reversal is the deciding factor.

Both fabrics, one bracket

A double roller carries a sunscreen and a blockout on the same bracket set, one tube behind the other. Sunscreen down through the day for the view and the glare, blockout down at night for dark and privacy. It costs more than one blind and considerably less than two separate installations, and in a main bedroom that also happens to have the best view in the house, it is usually where the conversation lands.

How wide is too wide

Fabric width sets the limit, not weight. Past roughly three metres a single roller begins to deflect along the tube and the fabric can start tracking off centre, so a very wide opening gets split into two or three blinds sharing one fascia. Split on the mullions and the join lines read as deliberate. Split in the middle of clear glass and they read as a mistake.

Where any split would look wrong, or where the head of the window is high enough that nobody is ever going to reach a chain, motorised linked blinds let a whole run travel as one. Which of those a window wants is a five-second answer once we are standing in front of it.

The details that get noticed six months later

Small decisions separate a roller that looks fitted from one that looks hung:

• a cassette or fascia hiding the tube and the roll, colour-matched to the frame rather than to the wall;
• chain side chosen for the way you actually walk into the room, not for whichever side is easier to drill;
• a child-safe chain tensioner fixed to the reveal — standard on anything corded, no extra charge, no debate;
• brackets packed out so the fabric hangs clear of a sash catch or a window handle, which is the commonest reason a blind scuffs itself;
• an enclosed bottom rail on anything exposed to a stoep draught, a slim open rail where the look matters more than the weight.

Spring-assist and motorised versions exist for the windows where a cord is unwelcome at all: nurseries, double-volume stairwells, and anything you would need a ladder to operate.

A ballpark before the measure

Rollers are quoted by the square metre of blind, fitted. Chain-driven: from about R1,000 up to R1,600 the square metre, the lower end being a plain blockout and the upper a good sunscreen or a twin bracket carrying two cloths at once. Swap the chain for a tube motor and the working band shifts to about R2,500 up to R3,800, motor, remote or switch, and setting-up included.

Below roughly a square metre the price stops scaling, because the tube, the brackets and the half-hour on the ladder do not shrink — there is a minimum on small windows. What lands on your quote is worked out opening by opening at the free measure and given to you on paper first.

Rollers we put up around the village and past it

The same fabric logic travels a few kilometres in every direction — wide living-room glazing in Cornwall Hill, repeating window schedules in Southdowns Estate, newer cluster homes in Raslouw, and the mixed old-and-new stock of Eldoraigne. Free measure, written quote per opening, wherever the stand is.

Asked on the driveway, most weeks