[bikestuff]

Gurus,

Many of us have Hunter Douglas electric blinds in our coaches.  These use Somfy motors to raise and lower the blinds.  On my coach, the shade in the front window is not made by HD but also uses a Somfy DC electric motor.  You can tell a Somfy motor by the yellow and black limit switches that are on one end of the shade.  (Yellow for Up, and Black for Down)

Today, I was messing with setting the limit switches on my front shade and one of them stuck.  (Aw shucks!).

I happened to have a couple of old motors, so I took one apart to see why it was binding.  First, I messed with my sacrificial motor and got one of the switches bound up (stuck in depressed position).

I tried prying on the sides of the switch.  I tried tapping on the switch.  I tried contact cleaner.  Nope.  Nothing worked.

Then I pressed extra hard on the switch and it bounced back.  It turns out that there is a kind of latching mechanism inside the switch.  Pressing extra hard released the latch and the switch returned to normal position.

   

I tried the technique on the front shade and it worked!  

I am posting in the hope of keeping someone from buying a new motor because they think they broke the limit switch.

Cheers,
bill

[Land Yacht]

I got ambitious inside today. I started adjusting the stop switches on my Silhouette blinds so the one switch for all 4 blinds would work properly.

Somehow my kitchen blind is upside down or inside out. The up limit switch controls the down, and the down limit switch controls the up. The result is the All in 1 switch works great except the kitchen is going up while others are going down. I have not pulled the shade out yet as I don’t know how it comes out of the socket. Specifically what do I need to reverse to get this one back in sync?

[bikestuff]

Mike,

Was the blind working before? I would start there.....

I believe these are 12V DC motors and that they use the polarity of the signal to figure out the direction.

I know that there are only two wires and that both wires are the same color.

If you go to the left end (where the controls are) you will find two white wires. You could measure the voltage on the two wires to verify the 12VDC part. If that is the case, I would mark the wires then swap the wires.

bill

[Land Yacht]

Bill, the blind works fine from its own switch, just runs backward from the all-in1 switch. I switched he wires on the single switch and it ran backwards, but that did not reverse the all-in-1 switch.

When I looked at the all-in-1 switch, it only had 4 wires also, so switching wires there would have reversed all 4 shades, resulting in the same issue - one is out of sync. As I posted earlier, somehow on the kitchen blind the up and down limit settings are switched but the shade rolls up the same direction as others. Is there a controller box where I can swap wires only for the kitchen shade? i.e. the all-in-1 switch must go to something to split out to the 4 shades.

[bikestuff]

How about swapping the wires on the motor and the wires on the single switch?

[DK on the road]

Ok, I've created a problem while trying to adjust the shade in the front windshield. I ended up pulling/breaking the wires off of the little DC motor. Right at the face of the motor.

I've not taken it all down yet, but can I reattach the wires back inside? By Bills picture, it doesn't look like it. If that's not possible, where can I get another motor?