Make your dumb blinds smart with this easy to install solution
Smart blinds are one of the most impressive additions to any smart home.
To have your blinds open in the morning and close in the evening – or even to adjust when it’s bright or dark outside – with no effort on your part, is a luxury touch that the connected home revolution has presented to a new, wider audience.
However, that luxury touch, in the past, has often come with a luxury price tag. And while there are now more mainstream efforts to rival the custom build setups of the past, none are as affordable or as easy to install as the Sunsa Wand.
The Sunsa Wand, which has just landed on Indiegogo for pre-orders (and has already smashed its crowdfund target) is a battery-powered device that simply replaces your wand/tilt mechanism on your existing blinds.
Dubbed, “the world’s simplest smart blind”, the Sunsa Wand can be installed in less than 2 minutes, with no special tools needed. You simply have to pop off your existing crank mechanism and pop the Wand into place.
You’ve then got yourself some Wi-Fi connected automated, motorized smart blinds, which can tilt your blinds open and closed.
The Sunsa Wand is able to work with horizontal, vertical and mini blinds, and you are able to control and adjust the opening and closing settings, set schedules and the like all through a connected smartphone app; both iOS and Android users are catered for.
There’s no need for an additional smart home hub or bridge, the Sunsa Wand will connect directly to your router and the Wand is also compatible with Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s voice assistant as well.
That means you can say things like, “Alexa, open the blinds” as well as adding your blinds into your Alexa automations and routines. For example, you might have all the blinds downstairs open, and the ones in your bedroom tilt a bit, when you say, “Okay Google, good morning.”
With Alexa and Google Assistant compatibility, the possibilities to sync up your Sunsa Wand smart blinds with the rest of your connected devices are pretty limitless.
HomeKit, SmartThings and IFTTT intergrations are also all coming soon, as well.

”Imagine your blinds opening up in the morning so you wake up to natural light, and then closing at night for privacy,” explained Adam Zilberbaum, founder of Sunsa.
”The Sunsa Wand operates on your schedule with your preferences. From lights to locks to thermostats, most things in the house can easily be automated, except horizontal, vertical, and mini-blinds. With Sunsa, we set out to fix this with a simple, smart, retrofit solution that allows your blinds to be automated and respond to your voice or be controlled via your mobile app.”
The blinds themselves also become pretty autonomous thanks to built in light and temperature sensors, which can adjust the blinds based on preferences that you set within the companion app.
Powered by four regular AA batteries – which will get you a year’s worth of usage before you need to switch them out – you can also choose to have the Sunsa Wand connected to an optional solar panel, which sticks to the window, or you can even choose to plug the Wand directly into the mains.
Blinds can be controlled individually, or grouped within the app and there’s no limit to the amount of groups a single Sunsa Wand can be in; think ‘kitchen’, ‘downstairs’, ‘whole home’ and so on.
The Sunsa Wand is now available for pre-order at an early-adopter discount of $84 over on Indiegogo. The retail price when it goes on sale next year will be $119, so it’s a pretty big saving.
There are also discounts available if you buy in bulk, with 2, 4, 8 and 16 packs all available to pre-order now too. And Sunsa is offering Ambient readers an extra 10% off those multi-packs too – just click the following links for your prefered pack size:
The Sunsa Wand will start shipping early in 2021.