What to look for while buying Roller Shutters?

When making the decision to purchase roller shutters it is important to consider the quality of the product and service that will be offered throughout the lifespan of your roller shutter as roller shutters are permanently fixed once installed and, being custom made cannot be used elsewhere. The first thing to consider should be how responsive the company is to your calls, emails & chats and how fast you can get your quote as this will give you a good indication of how the business operates, if they are slow to react it will generally mean that they don’t have the right systems in place or they don’t care. Learn more about buying roller shutters

Why Roller Shutters are the fastest growing window covering in Australia

Roller Shutters are a growing industry, with a total of around 280,000 roller shutters sold per year across Australia and a growth rate of 8% per year, more and more people are making the decision to purchase the ultimate product in home comfort. The reason for the rapid growth is because there is no other product on the market today that offers so many benefits in one package like what roller shutters can offer. Once you install roller shutters there is no need to have an alarm system, window grilles, outside canvas awnings, internal blinds, drapes, terylene curtains and window tinting plus your air conditioner and heater will not be used as much because our window shutters keep the cold out in winter and the heat out in summer, nothing comes close.

What makes our roller shutters so special?

There are many things that put our roller shutters a notch above our competitors such as having 13 colorbond colours from which to choose from, matte smooth paint finish for shutter box and guides, security locks, shutter stops, low noise and high durability Italian motors as well as high quality Italian made roller shutter profile. Our security shutters are available in all major cities across Australia including Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Hobart

How much do roller shutters cost?

The prices vary depending on which state and city you live in Melbourne, Adelaide & Perth have the most window roller shutter suppliers so prices are a little less, Sydney and Brisbane are less competitive so the prices are a little higher. Here at Ultimate Shutter we have focused on quality of product and service as well as cost efficiency rather than exclusively focused on cost alone like many of our competitors. As a result our roller shutters installed and wired, on average, will cost $1390, about 15% more than the average competitor's security shutters but with quality and service second to none. We believe that paying a little more to ensure that the product is as long-lasting and functional as possible is the best solution to consumers needs. We have gone to great lengths to design and engineer our security shutters to look better perform better and last longer than our competitors window roller shutters so for us we build our security shutters to meet high quality standards while our competitors build their shutters to a price.

Smart Roller Shutter buyer facts

So you're thinking of putting window shutters on your home or business because you have some issues that you want to fix or you are going to build, renovate or extend your home and you simply want to take advantage of the many benefits of our security shutters. The smart roller shutter buyer knows that you will not need to have drapes, venetians, verticals, air-conditioning, alarm, awnings because shutters will do what all of those products put together will do from just one package simply amazing. Our Roller Shutters are also available Australia wide so no matter where you are, be it Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, or Hobart we have you covered.

Are roller shutters going to solve your problems?

Our roller shutters have been used across a wide range of applications to solve many problems faced Australia-wide. These include: window protection against burglaries and vandalism, home and business climate control with benefits of 15° reduction in home and business temperature during hot Australian summer days and 15° increase during the cold and chilly winter days, reduction of unwanted outside noise by up to 85%, increased home privacy, 100% reduction in light and glare from window openings, 45% energy savings yearly, storm and hailstone protection, bushfire protection or just simply peace of mind.

30 Mar 2017

Soundproofing tests for our roller shutters

Frequent readers of our blog will remember the painstaking procedures we went through to ensure our colour matching accuracy was first class. We ended up testing over 300 samples to ensure our Colorbond colour roller shutters were an exact match to other Colorbond products.

This week we went on a similar journey. We wanted to test our products against roller shutter industry’s claims that shutters block “up to 50%” of external noise. Here are a few claims we found to test:

* “I can’t imagine roller shutters helping much”

* “3-10 decibels”

* “up to 50%”

* “roller shutters don’t block that much noise”

* “only reduce sound of up to 20%”

Our biggest competitor, and the most well known shutter company in Australia, claims “up to 50%.” Our shutters have now been proven to smash that number. Let’s dig into the tests!

NDI Decibel Meter

So, how did we conduct the tests?

First, we bought the NDI Decibel Meter (above). The device measures the decibel level through an attached microphone. We were looking for the “max” decibel level in all of our tests to see at high volumes, how much sound was blocked out.

We have a purpose-built box with a shutter attached (left) that we have built to run a series of tests this year. We will be testing sound, heat, cold, bushfire protection, home security and any other tests we can think to run. We did NOT have a window on the shutter so all test results are shutter-only, not including a single or double paned window.

What sounds are annoying or persistent? We chose: jackhammer, party music, white noise, and several steady tones. We then ran a rainbow of tones through and tried to get it as loud as possible. We don’t suggest subjecting your own ears to anything over 14000 hz as it’s painful but if you’d like to test, we used this frequency generator set as loud as the external speakers would go.

Then we blasted each sound for 30 seconds and recorded the max decibel level, closed the shutter, let it settle to a quiet level, and then blasted the same sound again for another 30 seconds.

Our test used a variety of sounds, frequencies and pitches to ensure maximum viability in the real world when you install shutters on your home.

How Would We Measure Results?

There’s a lot of confusion with how to measure sound test results so we took our time to ensure we were measuring the right metric. For instance, you could have an ambient decibel level (db) of 40 in a quiet room. If a sound with the window open is 80 and the sound with the shutter down is 60 you could call that a “50% reduction” (60 being halfway from 40 to 80) or a 25% reduction (taking 20 off 80). Neither are correct.

The correct way to measure sound reduction is through a change of level. For every 10 dB increase, the perceived loudness of sound doubles. For every 10 dB down it halves. A change from 80 to 60 is 20 dB, which is a 75% noise reduction.

Make sense? See the charts to the left & right for more information on what the data means.

We then stuffed our Marketing Manager into the box along with the device and a notepad. (Good luck writing in the dark!)

He reset the device each time and kept track of the max levels for each sound. He also threatened to test the security of the shutter if we left him in there too long.

What Did We Learn?

First, writing in the dark is very messy. Bring a light source. Second, the box wasn’t fully sealed like it would be on a home so there was a bit of sound going around and under the shutter. This means that our roller shutters would actually block more sound than we found in our tests.

So let’s see the actual data!

Our roller shutters blocked up to 26.3 dB of sound on the jackhammer test. That’s more noise reduction than a really good pair of noise protection ear muffs (Noise Reduction: 26.0)

Statistically, soundproof Windows Shutter by Ultimate Shutter block out up to 80% of perceived loudness based on our testing. Our shutters block out way more than the 50% advertised by our competitors and do significantly reduce the sound in your home. Keep in mind we didn’t have a window in place and we’re evaluating a shutter-only solution. Windows open & no shutter vs window closed with a shutter would be an even more drastic sound reduction performance.

If you want to see these results for yourself, you’re welcome to drop by the office and we can lock you in the cabinet until you agree with us. ????

We hope you’ve enjoyed this thorough look into our sound tests. If you’re interested in soundproofing your home office or studio, contact us and let’s get started.