Solving Common Window Shade Problems

Home, condo or office, roller-style window shades from Mazer Wholesale offer a lot of benefits. Taking proper care of them will make sure you get years of good service from your investment. Yet sometimes a small problem will arise in having the window shade operating properly. This post is all about solving common window shade problems… complete with videos!

Window shades give you privacy and more… like the ability to control indoor lighting, especially for rooms that face direct sunshine at certain times of day. The good news is that you can usually install them yourself, with only a few basic tools. Read on to learn about taking care of your shades.

First, in case you haven’t seen it yet, we recently did a full blog post on best practises for installing roller window shades. If you need to see that again (or for the first time as you start an installation project), click here. That post contains specific information on measuring your windows for the proper type of installation and a lot more. 

Window Shade Basics – Hardware Mounting Brackets

Pretty much everyone knows how roll-up windows shades work, after they’ve been installed. Pull down on the shade and hold it while it moves to roll back up, and then the shade uses an internal mechanism to stay in place at the level you’ve pulled it down to. As you pull the shade down into place, there’s a coiled spring inside the shade that creates a reverse-action tension… the shade “wants” to spin back, and return itself to a fully wound-up position. 

There’s a locking mechanism inside that prevents that from happening, until you pull on it again. Just a slight tug on the bottom of a shade that’s already been pulled down and the mechanism releases the shade. That allows the coiled-up spring inside to do its thing, and the shade re-winds itself back up and out of your way, until the next time you need it. 

Of course all this only works if there’s something holding the shade in place and not allowing it to freely spin on the mounting brackets. If that happened, the whole shade would spin, and there’s be no spring tension to wind the shade up to the top again, when you want to let in maximum light. 

All this may sound complicated, but it’s not. As long as the spring has something to firmly hold it in place, everything works as planned. And that’s where the mounting brackets come into place, along with the basic design of the shade itself. 

One end of the shade has a simple pin sticking out straight from the end of the rolled-up shade. It simply allows the shade to roll and spin freely. The other side however has quite a different looking pin. It looks like someone took a larger rounded pin and flattened it with a hammer. This design is important, because it holds the internal spring (inside the round body of the shade) in place, allowing it to coil and create that “spring back” energy when you tug on the bottom of the shade to let it roll back up and open. 

Here’s a great video from Andrew Mazer of Mazer Wholesale that shows larger-than-life images of the two different brackets used to hold window shades in place. The video also shows how the brackets can be installed into window frames or on the wall to give flexible options on different ways to hang and install the shades.

Window Shade Troubleshooting #1 – Incomplete Roll Up 

Installing window shades from Mazer Wholesale is usually a simple, D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) job. Yet after a successful installation job, you may find that the shade does not work exactly “as advertised.” Once scenario is this: While the shade pulls all the way down and stays in place properly, when you want to roll it back up (and let more light into the room), the shade may not completely wind back up, leaving a few inches (or more) of the shade unrolled and blocking your view. 

That’s usually caused by the shade’s inner spring not coiling enough to give the shade the needed tension to “rewind” all the way back up. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix to this. Check out this how-to video from Mazer Wholesale’s Andrew Mazer: 

Window Shade Troubleshooting #2 – Over-Tight Spring

Now on the other hand, it’s also possible that the spring in the window shade may be wound too tightly. This can make it difficult to pull the shade all the way down. It may even completely refuse to extend all the way to the bottom of the window when you pull on it. This is the exact opposite of the problem addressed in the previous video. The good news is that once again, it’s a relatively simple fix. And once again, here’s Andrew Mazer to show you how to solve this particular window shade “challenge.” 

Roll-up window shades are an economical, easy-to-install way to better control light in a room. Mazer Wholesale offers a huge selection of different sizes and styles… way more than any local hardware store or big-box home improvement warehouse. We ship directly to you – no driving to the store, no hassling with out-of-stock sizes and special orders. Call Mazer Wholesale first and get the job done right.