I just got my Smartwings shades installed about a week ago and figured I'd share some thoughts and tips for anyone looking into them. I've attached some photos of the setup too. The WAF is 10/10! I should have done this earlier but given the work I knew I'd put into this I kept pushing it back on the to-dos. Average cost was about $450 per blind after measuring, install fees, solar panels, zigbee motors, and other upgrades. Great price all in compared to other companies especially given my sliding doors are huge at 12’ x 8’ and I have three of them. 

We ordered 11 shades total and it took eleven days from ordering for them to be delivered. 9 of those were for three 12’ sliding glass doors (3 shades per door). I went with the Zigbee motors to control them in Home Assistant mainly because it is the cheapest pairing option that fit my needs. All 11 blinds are Essential Cream, 70% blackout, with the fabric top cover, default silver bottom bar. We bought the swatches and I’d recommend it because we were originally planning 50% but you can basically see through that so that wouldn’t have been great for our sliders since the main goal is privacy at night.

If you are doing sliding glass doors, I recommend hard wiring them even if you don't have wiring inside the walls but have an outlet nearby. It's amazing that they all go up and down together at the exact same time and speed. The installer mentioned that with battery/solar, or even just having different sized shades or battery levels next to each other, they might not travel at the same rate. I also didn’t want to be charging all of those sliding door motors when they died. Just an extra thing I didn’t want to be responsible for.

Smartwings support over email was very helpful to get the exact hard wire setup I wanted. For each set of three shades, we used one 12v 6amp power supply along with some Y-splitters and JST extenders. I used photopea to create a rough diagram which was helpful for the installer as well as support.

I usually DIY stuff like this but I don’t have a tall enough ladder and I would have hated to measure incorrectly for this big of a purchase so I used the recommended person from smartwings’ site through NWI. He got the whole install done in around 2.5 hours (with two of them being high ladder work), which is way faster than I could have done even if I had the right ladder.

If you get solar or battery shades I'd suggest to charge them the first time before installing them. I didn't think about that, so the installer had to run an extension cord and charge them for 5 minutes before the solar panel could be added to pair with the remote and set the top and bottom positions.

To keep the hardwired setup as clean as I could, I 3D printed some custom boxes in matte PLA to hide the included black power supplies inside. I used this [box model](https://makerworld.com/en/models/1569393-power-plug-protector-box#profileId-1650336) on MakerWorld, but I just removed the lightning bolt from the file before printing and I didn’t need the little screw down brackets as it’s a pretty tight fit in there as is. Now only the white cables (the 3’ extension cord and the Y JST adapter) run out of the box, making it way less noticeable. I’ll probably get some double sided tape to stick the jst cables running up the wall to the side trim. I purposefully picked the far side of the rooms to put the power supply so the wires running up wouldn’t be visible from the side as well.  

Pairing to Zigbee2MQTT in home assistant took a bit of troubleshooting. They wouldn't show up in the dashboard for pairing initially when clicking the pair button on the blind motor itself. I was able to get them connected by using the remote. Permit join, then the rest on the remote channel it’s paired to until it does a jog on each button click: PROGRAM, then UP, then PROGRAM again and it will jog a few times if it pairs correctly in z2m after all those steps. Someone said that on a different thread I now can’t find but shout out to them.

The only minor issue right now is that when they are physically open, they show as closed in HA. I tried the invert cover option in z2m but that doesn’t seem to change anything for me. I'm still working on fixing that reversed state so if anyone has an idea how to fix that please let me know! For now I created a reverse entity basically so that I can actually say open and it opens vs closing when I say open but that’s kinda a pain and not ideal. I tried the invert state within z2m but no luck there. 

tldr: highly recommend as their support is great, shades are high quality, integrates well in ha, and the pricing is super competitive. Please help if you know how to inverse shade states in z2m. 

Smartwings Shades Review (Zigbee & Hardwired)