Before we placed the order, we had several questions that we emailed to Blindify. They answered them quickly.
We have an east-facing sliding glass door. The view of the Chesapeake Bay is awesome, but when the sun comes up each morning, it blasts directly into the room until it rises high enough to be blocked by the upper balcony. That's usually about 10:30am. While the warmth of the sun is welcomed in winter, the rest of the year the sun is too hot and too bright.
We looked at all kinds of curtains and drapes, but liked the idea of a simple motorized one. Then we had to decide whether to make it a black-out or a see-through. Blindify has both. They also have remotes that connect to a wireless voice-activated network. We chose the simpler hand remote with wall mount. The instructions for the remote seemed very complicated. Fortunately, after installing the blind, I just pushed the button on the remote and IT WORKED!!! Yay!!!!
We had two problems to solve. The first was that I had positioned two of the mounting brackets on the very edge of the door frame molding. Because there's a small piece of reinforcement in the casing at the end, the bracket would not fit. I simply took the two screws out and moved the bracket about an inch away from the end of the molding. Problem solved. I also added spacers between the mounting bracket and the molding because the molding was thinner there and I wanted the bracket to remain straight. No Problem!
I ordered the solar panel to constantly keep the internal battery charged. I mounted it in the upper left corner of the window that did not move. (see photo) There's a small bump on the back of the solar panel packed with circuitry. The sliding glass door would hit it if I opened it up all the way, so I placed a small piece of wood in the lower part of the slider track to keep the slider from opening too far and breaking the back of the solar panel. No Problem!
I found the USB port and charge light on the left side (which is where we had asked for) and plugged in the included USB A to USB C cable. When I plugged the USB A cable in to a charge device, the red light on the blind next to the USB C connector lit up. Ten minutes later the light turned green, indicating full charge. We held our breaths and hit the down arrow on the wireless remote. The shade slowly descended and stopped EXACTLY where it was supposed to. Yay Blindify!
