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.
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.
I don’t have kids so can I have other stuff that might be bad for them around my house?
About 9 children die every year , strangled by mini blinds. 3500 children are killed by guns every year.
Why did we only fix the most unlikely one?
gun violence isn’t an engineering problem. miniblind cords are.
There’s no amendment protecting mini blinds.
Probably because there isn’t a giant mini blind lobby, and people plastering stickers all over their pickup trucks yelling about their mini blind rights.
Shhhh. Don’t give the conservatives more stuff to scream about.
Because we need to repeal the 2nd amendment
I wouldn’t say repeal, I would say adapt & clarify.
If the original purpose was for a “well regulated militia,” then there should be regulations and training for you to be able to own a gun.
Fail your certification, lose your license.
Well that’s depressing.
Actually I don’t think it is, because they’re fixing it. “Hey here’s a problem, let’s use engineering to eliminate the problem.” Best thing we do as a species.
Don’t make the two strings into a loop. Problem solved. Or secure the loop to the wall. Problem solved. But really what I meant is that it’s depressing that people have managed to strangle themselves in a contraption that’s pretty benign by design.
I agree. It’s really sad when children and pets die accidentally or for any reason really.
What’s truly depressing is all the jaded assholes who think that their adult intelligence is the standard for every baby and animal in the world so it’s somehow the kids fault for strangling themselves because they should have known better
Has anybody ever said that?
in this magical world you live in, do corded ear buds stay untangled as well?
They tend to tie themselves into a loop, even when left open.
The risk is not to people in general, but specifically young children and pets that wouldn’t be expected to know how to get themselves out.
I guess that’s understandable. The ones we have use a metal chain that’s in a loop, but secured to the wall. You just pull one side or the other to raise or lower the blinds. It works okay. We do have one of those old-school ones in the kitchen though, and I like how rapidly I can raise the blinds.
Also, if you have mini blinds made in the 70s, they’re full of lead
It is how you protected yourself from nuclear blasts since it was the cold war and all.
Fuckin-a roit buddy! Built back when people knew how to party!
Ah yes, miniblinds are the real threat… not school shootings
Ah yes, let’s get the consumer product safety commission on the problem of school shootings. Hell, since they are so able to ban the way blinds chords are setup, why aren’t they ending climate change? The genocide of palastinians? I for one demand the consumer product safety commission do it’s fucking job and reform the American policing system.
If we can only solve one problem at a time, then climate change is the only problem that matters.
If we skip that one the rest solve themselves
Witness the horror replacing it
Natural selection is dead.
Natural selection is dead.
What a concept
The main problem with society is the effort made to mitigate infant mortality rates
External Venetian blinds are the best, but I think they aren’t so popular in the US from what I heard?
In the US nearly every window that opens has a screen in it to keep insects out. That’s why venetian blinds have gone out of favor in the past 70 years.
I may be missing the point. How do the external venetian blinds clash with insect screens?
My father put blinds in various windows in his house and still has the external venetian blinds nonetheless.
I may be missing the point. How do the external venetian blinds clash with insect screens?
I’ve never had external blinds, but I’d assume the issue is being able to access them to open or close them. I suppose for a single-story house you could go outside every time?
Ah no, no way!
You have an articulated rod on the inside which goes through a small hole to the blind cage outside, which you turn to move the blinds up and down, and the first bit of movement in either direction affects the tilt of the blinds. The rod can be straightened when you’re not turning it and it has a plastic holder on the frame so it doesn’t dangle around.
I’m not sure if I’m describing it well, here is a picture of the rod:
And a picture of the blinds:
Nowadays more and more people put in a little electric motor with a remote control instead.
I’m not sure what that is. Outside of the window?
Yes. It keeps the heat that is generated on the surface of the blinds outside your window, so the room doesn’t heat up so much.
Wouldn’t they get really dirty? I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in the US.
Yes, it does become part of cleaning the window to also wipe the slats. They are usually made of Aluminium as far as I know.
I posted a picture in a nearby branch of the comment tree.
Selling plastic straws is not permitted in the EU anymore, so I’m buying them on Amazon. Don’t know whether these regulations apply only to physical stores or Amazon doesn’t give a damn, but you can go around such laws quite easily.
Selling plastic straws is not permitted in the EU anymore
For real? Because plastic straws, and not the bajillion tons of packaging materials are the bane of our existence. Right?
Likely they don’t care. Someone bought a bunch of cigarettes from Amazon.
They aren’t illegal to sell.
Manufacturers can’t make them any longer, existing inventory is permitted to be sold off. So they can be found on amazon, ebay, and a bunch of other places still. Just won’t see any new stock coming in, and places that have less stock (as in, not gigantic warehouses) haven’t been getting new ones in for some time. Nearly a year now I believe.
The phrase the Lowe’s associate used was “Illegal to have on store shelves.”
I’m not sure you should have a Lowe’s Associate as a legal advisor.
The relevant text:
Corded blinds are dangerous to children and pets. Roughly one child per month dies from blind cord strangulation, and more than 600 children per year are injured. That’s nearly an average of 2 preventable injuries to a child per day. Between 1990 and 2015, more than 16,000 children were injured.
New Voluntary Standards
- The Window Covering Manufacturers Association decided safer standards in January 2018.
- Manufacturers adopted the new standard on cordless blinds in December 2018.
- In 2019, all standard model window blinds were expected to be cordless.
Cordless Blinds & Law
- Corded blinds are not regulated under state or federal legislation.
- New, safer guidelines allow for cords on custom-made coverings.
- Per WCMA standards, custom cords should not be longer than 40% of the window height.
I think you should.
oh, Amazon will gladly sell you illegal goods. and no one will stop them
Well to be fair, they are annoying as hell to operate.
Oh, I see you havent used the style that replaced them yet. Infinitely worse.
The idea in concept is you just lift up or pull down from the bottom of the blinds and they’ll stay in place. In practice however, you pull down and they refuse to budge, risking you breaking them. And then when you lift up, they go to a certain point and then just stop retracting and will fall down halfway from where you wanted them.
I hate them. I hate them so much. Although, I will say blinds in general are just awful. Curtains are the superior window shade.
You got cheap ones. And like bottom of the barrel cheap. I have ones from Home Depot and that has never happened. What has happened is that the internal strings have a lot more friction on them and they have snapped, rendering the entire thing broken. But of course I got the cheapest ones from Home Depot too.
I haven’t experienced them those but the pull down shades I’ve used in the past have thing where you can twist the rod to set the tension and make them work better. Does it have something like that you can do? Also I agree with you about just using curtains
I remember my dad bought some for his house and they didn’t have the pullstrings. I remember thinking that was so neat because the pullstring ones were always a pain in the ass to raise/lower.
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.
I’d always heard them called “Venetian blinds”, compared to roller blinds.
Do the vertical giant blinds count as regular blinds or are those the large version? Link
I hate those so much. Bougie and useless in my experience
Bougie? I associate them with cheap shitty apartments.
Clackety clackety swishety clack. Every time there is a breeze.
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.
I’d say those count. Edited my other comment
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’ve never understood why they had more than 1 string for a set of blinds, it’s not like anybody wants to raise only one corner of it?
My experience has been that stringless blinds are the Landlord Special of window covering, they suck ass and barely raise up if you don’t get the individual “blades” perfectly horizontal.
The two strings is so that you can keep them level when one side inevitably wears slightly longer than the other.
more than 1 string for a set of blinds
Small differences in rolling behaviour for each string as they’re collected on the roll can cause tuning problems and so need tiny adjustment periodically.
Just tie a knot. Avoid the overhand - do a climber’s figure-8 instead - if you want to untie it later for tuning ever.
Little trick I figured out as a kid in case you ever have the string blinds again (also, never seen stringless):
Cut a string to the same length as the two coming out of the blinds, snip the little plastic cap off the two attached to the blinds, and braid the three strings together, tie at the end. Never pull unevenly again.
You can also just leave the cap intact, and and just tie the end of the cord in a knot to keep the strings together. Just loop it around itself and poke the end through the loop and tighten it to make the knot sit near the end of the cord.
You can’t braid them together, they won’t go through the take-up mechanism when you drop them closed. I tried wrapping one with the same idea in mind and had to sit and unwrap them because I couldn’t open them anymore.
You could just braid the bottom and set the braid with a knot, but that’s basically what the knot at the end and the cap do.
Even if you braid it while the blinds are already closed it won’t work?
I haven’t tried this yet but want to try when I get home. I worry about my cats getting tangled and one cord would be better than whatever the hell is going on with it now lol.
I’ve personally done it, but now I wonder if those blinds were somehow loose or different. Don’t wanna suggest you do it just to have to undo it if it doesn’t work :/
One string pulling up the left side, one string pulling up the right side. They are separated in the “down” position, so they have to be separated in the “up” as well.
If you use only one string in the middle, they will never stay level.
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?
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.
Remember, if something can’t be 100% improved, all improvement is worthless!
Username checks out. If they weren’t so awful, maybe people would care about defending them, but there’s just all-around awful. They’re uglier, harder to use, and seem to frequently get damaged (probably mostly from people trying to fight with them or just bending them out of the way because damaging them is worth it to avoid dealing with them…
There’s always roller blinds for the ones among us to whom mini blinds are too difficult to use.
Is it that they’re “too difficult to use” or is it just that they’re a pain in the ass? Because it’s the latter in my experience.
In my experience, one begets the other.
It’s a pain in the ass because its difficult to use. Or, at least more difficult than it needs to be.
Yeah, but they also break really easily, and then you have the fun of either trying to get the string fixed or back on the track or whatever or just replacing the whole thing.
Unrelated to blinds but my friend told me about having hanging Christmas cords. Her car made a wrong jump and she came home to a dead cat. She was 5. I am trauma’d.
I know what you were trying to write, but I am still picturing your friend as 5 yr old, speeding her car over a ramp so bad, it caused her cat miles away at home to die in shock.
Unrelated to blinds but my friend told me about having hanging Christmas cords. Her car made a wrong jump and she came home to a dead cat. She was 5. I am trauma’d.
Typo strikes again!
