Motorised blinds in Pakenham.

Motorising every blind in the house is usually a waste. Motorising the right three or four is one of the best value decisions in the whole job. The test is simple: motorise the blinds you would otherwise adjust twice a day, and the blinds you cannot comfortably reach. Everything else can stay manual.

In a Pakenham home that normally means the living and dining blinds on the western wall, plus any stairwell or high-set window. Those living-room blinds get moved every single afternoon in summer, and on a wide span they are heavy enough that people stop bothering. High windows above a stairwell or over a kitchen bench never get touched at all, which means the room they are supposed to protect just cooks. A motor fixes both problems for $150 to $350 per blind.

The automation that actually matters

Voice control is the feature everybody asks about and the one that gets used least. The feature that changes how the house feels is scheduling. A living-room blind set to drop to 70 percent at 2:30pm through summer keeps the heat out before it arrives, which is a completely different result from closing the blind at 5pm when the room is already 30 degrees. Because Pakenham blocks are small and eaves are shallow, the window of time where that matters is narrow and predictable, so a simple schedule does most of the work.

The other genuinely useful setting is a morning schedule: bedroom blinds lifting just after sunrise so the glass and the fabric dry out, which helps with the winter condensation problem in tightly sealed new estate homes. Sun sensors are available and work well on a consistently exposed elevation, though on most homes a time-based schedule with a seasonal tweak is simpler and does 90 percent of the job.

Which blinds can be motorised

• Roller blinds: The cleanest motorisation of the lot. The motor sits inside the tube, so nothing is visible and the blind looks identical to a manual one. Double rollers can run two independent motors on one bracket.
• Venetian blinds: Motors handle both tilt and lift. Particularly worthwhile on wide or high venetians where manual tilt and lift is a two-handed job.
• Vertical blinds: A motorised head track rotates the vanes and traverses the stack. Excellent on a wide alfresco sliding door you use several times a day.
• Honeycomb cell blinds: Especially good on a top-down bottom-up blind, where two rails means two separate movements to get right by hand.

Battery or hardwired

For an existing home, battery, without much debate. A rechargeable lithium motor lives inside the tube or head rail, charges from a USB lead or a removable pack, and typically runs several months to a year between charges depending on how many times a day the blind moves. No wiring, no electrician, no patching plaster. About $150 to $280 per blind.

Hardwired motors are the right call in a new build or a serious renovation, where an electrician can drop power to the head of each window before the walls are closed up. You never think about charging again. About $220 to $350 per blind plus the electrical work. If you are building in one of the Pakenham estates and think you might motorise later, get power to the window heads now: that is the expensive part to retrofit, not the motor.

Hubs, apps and what talks to what

The motors themselves work from a handheld remote out of the box. To get phone control, voice assistants and schedules you need a hub or bridge, which connects the motors to your home wifi. That is a one-off cost of $150 to $350 for the whole home, not per blind. From there the system typically integrates with Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and in some ranges Apple Home. We set the hub up, name the blinds sensibly by room, build your first schedules with you at handover, and make sure someone in the house other than the person who ordered them knows how to use it.

Child safety

This is the strongest argument for motorisation and it is the one we lead with in homes with young children. A motorised blind has no cord, no chain and no loop anywhere on it, so the hazard that the mandatory ACCC corded-blind standard exists to manage simply does not exist. We still fit the required cord guides, tension devices and labelling on every corded blind we install, but where there is a cot or a bed near a window we will always put cordless or motorised in front of you first.

Looking after them

Clean the blind itself exactly as you would the manual version. Beyond that, battery motors need charging when the app or the remote tells you, which for most households is once or twice a year and takes a couple of hours. Keep the charge lead somewhere you will find it. If a motor ever loses its limits (the top and bottom stop positions) they can be reset in under a minute, and we show you how at handover rather than leaving you to a manual.

2026 price band

Motorisation adds $150 to $350 per blind on top of the blind, supplied, fitted and set up, GST included. A hub is a further $150 to $350 once for the home. On a typical Pakenham job that means motorising the three living-area blinds costs roughly $600 to $750, plus a hub if you want the app and the scheduling. Full context against the other ranges is on the 2026 pricing page.