Replacing a broken set of blinds in my house and apparently no one sells the old standard kind where you pull the cord to raise them, I guess because kids and/or pets could tangle in the cord? Bit of an education in miniblinds today.
That is the only kind I know of. How does the other kind work?
Edit: should have been more specific; the string ones are the ones I know of.
You lift them from the bottom and there is a system of gears and springs (citation needed) that assist with them being raised and hold them in place.
Pull them down from the bottom and they come down (with some resistance).
Huh. The string ones can be mounted inside the window. I guess these can’t then.
They can! They look identical to the old blinds, just without the string. I had to ask if the installers forgot the strings when we got new ones a few years ago!
Wait, I meant like in between the glass of the windows. If you have to pull and push the blinds themselves that would not work… right?
Are you saying that they’d be in between 2 stationary panes of glass? That sounds like a nightmare to deal with anyway.
Stationary for usual operations, at least. There is usually a mechanism to open it up so you can mend them if necessary.
I have some of those. There’s just a sliding mechanism built into the pane on the inside. No string. Much cleaner look and so much easier to use.
This is the only kind I know:
I think those are the ones being referred to. Nowadays they makes ones that look almost identical but don’t have the pullstrings. You can just raise and lower them from the bar on the bottom.
Which suck if you have windows higher than your head. Pullstring can be ten feet long and work just fine.
By some mechanism I don’t quite understand, you just grab the lower bar and either lift up or pull down.
The ones I put up in my house have a high tension spring inside the top. When you want to raise the blinds you lift them up when you want to lower the blinds you pull them down. They’re not fantastic but they work well enough. You have to kind of coax them to go up lift them up a few times but then again mine were the cheapest Walmart had available
I’ve got the Ikea version of these and they work great, no coaxing at all. Way easier than that stupid pull cord, I would never go back. Put them up all over the house. One of them went slightly crooked and I never did figure out why or how to fix it though. I think I will eventually get some higher quality replacements anyway.
I love that thing when i saw it, unfortunately i can’t have it because i suspect my cat will destroy it in a week, so i got a cheapo one with beaded cord that loop. I guess i have to tie that up for safety.
I also use the cheapest Walmart ones and they’re fine - much better than the “try 15 angles till you find the right one” cords. The trick is to raise them slowly and gingerly so that you’re not just bunching up the blinds.
My favorite thing about them is the snap-on installation. No more sketchy slide-in plastic cubes with a plastic cover. Just drill the metal clamp on and snap them in. Surprisingly sturdy.
I actually didn’t know the old style was “illegal.” I just thought they were so unpopular that they replaced them, even at the most basic option.
We use honeycomb blinds here. You can get them in partially transparent or blackout. They are spring-loaded, and you really can’t use them wrong, pull them up or down as fast or as crooked as you want.
Mine have a hard “handle” with a string attached to it on a pulley. Twist the handle to adjust the angle, pull the string down on one side to open them, pull the string down on the other side to close.
I didn’t even realize they were called "mini"blinds until I moved in to my current place and there was some kind of rule that mentioned them. I’d only heard them referred to as “blinds” my entire life up to that point. This implies the existence of larger blinds
which I’ve yet to see.Edit: I’ve definitely seen them. Apparently my brain is underclocked today.
Do the vertical giant blinds count as regular blinds or are those the large version? Link
I’d say those count. Edited my other comment
I hate those so much. Bougie and useless in my experience
Are they really that bougie? Cuz you can get some cheap ass ones.
they can’t be that bougie, every apartment I’ve ever been in with a sliding door has those, and usually somewhere from 1 to 5 of the slats have broken off from normal operation
You’ll never convince me that they’re not chosen for that reason. When the apartment falls to bits because of cheap components, they can retain the deposit.
Bougie? I associate them with cheap shitty apartments.
Clackety clackety swishety clack. Every time there is a breeze.
Owning a set of these for my glass sliding door is probably why I’m in the habit of calling the ones in windows “miniblinds.”
I’d always heard them called “Venetian blinds”, compared to roller blinds.
This seemed like such an arbitrary law that I went looking for it and apparently it’s a small committee (4 persons*) rule that was poorly substantiated. The rule itself has been shot down by an appeals court in 2023, but the industry obviously had already set plans in motion to change their product line ups.
“On September 13, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals vacated the CPSC’s rule on custom window coverings. The court agreed with WCMA that CPSC failed to provide an opportunity to comment on the underlying incident data, conducted a flawed cost-benefit analysis that ignored the enormous harm that the rule would have caused the multibillion-dollar custom window coverings industry, and selected an arbitrary effective date for the rule. The CPSC acknowledges that the industry will need at least 2 years to develop completely new products. So the six-month effective date would make it impossible for the window covering industry to create proven safe replacement products.”
https://suncoastblinds.com/understanding-the-cpsc-rule-on-window-coverings-and-the-appeal/
- I’m not from the USA, so to me it seems very weird that this is how decisions with far reaching consequences are taken. In the eu legislation like this gets putten through the wringer in the eu Commission, probably also voted on by the eu Parliament, and then still given years preparation time and back and forth between industry/lobby groups/government. But instead this was: 4 non elected people take a vote and those 4 see no issue with a 6 month deadline. Wth, what a rugpull this would have been for the industry.
Edit to add: that rule that lost in appeal in 2023, was from November 2022, so maybe it does go in effect in november 2024, since it seems like that timetable was the biggest issue for the industry. Just speculating though, can’t look it up atm.
I don’t have kids so can I have other stuff that might be bad for them around my house?
Anything is lethal when you give it to a million people. This is the main reason I take issue with pointing out individual examples of for example autonomous vehicle crashes and treating that as an evidence for why they’re inherently dangerous. Almost nothing is 100% safe. I bet there are dozens of people suffocating to their pillows each year.
So by your logic if a collision from bicycle or even from people running isn’t 100% safe, then it’s as dangerous as car?
More like if you contextualize the incidents of bicycles and pedestrians with cars, you might realize they’re safer than you think. This is absolutely false for cars and pedestrians though in America at least.
contextualize how?
Well, nothing is 100% safe, and we allow plenty of things that are demonstrably unsafe to continue. So if you compare bike-car collisions against say, firearm suicides in the US, you’ll see that bike-car collisions aren’t that bad.
The fundamental argument is that nothing is totally safe, but some things are safer than others.
so by your logic since nothing is as bad as [choose any cause of death], we should just… give up on improving safety?
Does no threshold for the rate of any cause of death justify improving safety?
I legitimately don’t understand your question. If you’re asking if the cost to improve safety may be too great in some cases, yes that is true in some cases. But you haven’t made that case in this specific instance yet.
Nope.
Are you saying we should not have safety regulations just because we can’t make everything 100% safe?
Remember, if something can’t be 100% improved, all improvement is worthless!
Nothing is ever 100% safe. Risk assessment is a big part of federal regulations. (See refs at JSTOR and NCBI) One of the key questions is what is the cost/benefit balance for a product. Kitchen knives are hazardous, but it’s very hard to cook without them, so they balance heavier on the benefit side despite the risks. Radithor is all risk and no benefit, so it was an easy decision to ban it.
The point ContrarianTrail was making is that there is some risk in nearly everything. People have died as a result of garden tools, cars, house pets, shaving, buckets, toothpicks, baseball, etc. Here’s a list. The part he left out is the cost/benefit analysis. I prefer pull cords on my blinds, and I find the new regulations annoying. But I guess some federal agency decided they aren’t so useful that it’s worth the risk to children. And it would be selfish to be all upset about it if it saves some child’s life.
I was giving them the chance to clarify their point, because they didn’t say anything beyond “nothing is safe” as a justification for poo-pooing an attempt to improve safety. Hence the question, which they have so far declined to answer themselves.
The point ContrarianTrail was making is that there is some risk in nearly everything. People have died as a result of garden tools, cars, house pets, shaving, buckets, toothpicks, baseball, etc. Here’s a list.
Yes, we all know “nothing is safe”. it’s a trivial point to make, and if that’s the only part of the situation you mention (as the person above did) you’re either not thinking very hard or are being deliberately misleading.
I prefer pull cords on my blinds, and I find the new regulations annoying. But I guess some federal agency decided they aren’t so useful that it’s worth the risk to children. And it would be selfish to be all upset about it if it saves some child’s life.
Exactly, it’s not that hard to understand. Pull-cord blinds cause deaths, and other reasonable alternatives do not. Framing the discussion to “100%” and dismissing accidents/deaths as anecdotes, to me, seems deliberately misleading. Yet you accuse me of being inflammatory by asking a follow up question. okay.
