SunSetter Awnings Reviews

Sunsetter's shipping leaves a lot to be desired. And during this debacle, I mentioned that to one of the people I had on the phone, and the lady said, "We know it's very hard to get a shipper to ship that kind of a product because it is in a big round tube." It's not like UPS could walk in with a little box and drop it on our porch. I got ahold of SunSetter again and they sent out another awning, which I got.

The first wrong awning came quickly compared to what Sunsetter said it would take. My thoughts were, "It's not a popular model and you probably had it in stock." When I wound up seeing what it was, I assumed that that was what it was. The second one, I didn't get. And the third one came within weeks. I was pleased that came as quick as it did and I got it right up and I've been able to use it. I thought I would get it up by Labor Day. But it came quickly.

The 11-foot motorized is what I picked this time. It's a good quality. I noticed a fold in the awning, and I thought, "As soon as it gets in the sun, it'll go away." It didn't. So, I alerted the company to the fact that it has a wrinkle. It was folded somewhere along the line before it was on the roller. And when it went on the roller, the fold didn't come out, and I thought it would in the sun, but it still doesn't. It's nothing that I was concerned about except my luck is the four years and 11 months and something will happen to it after the warranty is gone. And my only concern was to notify somebody to make them aware of the situation. That's all. Right now, it doesn't do anything other than when it rolls out and I look up at it, I could see where it was folded down the middle. Other than that, the quality of the merchandise is very good. It's well-built.

Meanwhile, as soon as I hired this guy and he started, I got an email from SunSetter saying that they passed my name onto a local installer that they use. They called me and I told them to send me their information if I needed any service, and they did. This past Monday, an installer came over and he had a SunSetter T-shirt on. It took him half an hour to fix the awning. I had to pay a little more money to get it fixed correctly, but it's fine now.

The only thing is, the installer lost a magnet that they need to use. So I called SunSetter yesterday and they're sending me that whole piece to install it. That installer lives 10 minutes from our house and told us to call him if we don’t want to put the magnet in. He’d be happy to come and do it again. It's like a little box that you have to put on. There's a certain spot that you put it on the awning where if the wind gets too violent, that closes it up. We don't leave the awning open anyway and we're not there, but just in case. That's part of what we paid for. I'm gonna try to set it myself. If I can't, the installer will come out and do it. By getting the awning, we can bring the kids out there now because the sun doesn't beat the heck out of them. I also got a whole new deck because we had some bad wood. I did that at the same time. So, it's fun. I would buy from SunSetter again and I would recommend them to my friends and family.

The only thing I had to call SunSetter on was that I couldn't remember and it doesn't say it in the manual on how to turn on those LED lights. You get a remote but I may have to call them again because I didn't write it down. We got to take the shade that comes down in the front. We got a few bells and whistles but everything that SunSetter promised came true. I got all the pros and I got no cons. The customer service has been wonderful and they're not gonna make you feel stupid. They were very good at explaining things to us.

SunSetter gives you a pamphlet of the expensive one and looking at the sizes, we thought we should be having a smaller one. But if we put up the size that we originally looked at, which was cheaper, we would never be able to get a table in here. When we looked at it initially and we saw the pricing, we never thought we would need something this big. So, we looked at a less expensive one. Once we saw what we had bought, we recognized that the advice they gave us in terms of getting our location was more what we needed than what we had initially been looking at. And we both said to ourselves if we had gone with that original thing that we would have been dissatisfied and then it was too late to do anything about it once you get to it. So, I'm happy with it. This is what we wanted. All of our neighbors who came over and looked at it loved it too. We've invited them for drinks and they will come. So, it works out well with our house.

Everything about the awning is fabulous. When we were looking at it, the way we pictured it was different than what came out, and what came out was better. We're loving our new awning. It’s a quality material. I watched the installers put it up and they were masterful. They got it all up there very quickly and took their time making sure they hit all the studs with the lag bolts. We bought it with the 10-year warranty because with our due self-exposure, we'd be better off with a 10-year warranty rather than a 5. And the choices of the colors were even better with the 10. So, we're happy campers.

The functionality of the awning is very simple. You can either attach it to a ceiling or a wall. It doesn't even have to be a ceiling. This could be a brace overhead protruding out of a wall and doesn't have to be all the way to the ceiling. But it installs very easily. It works fine when it's straight and manufactured correctly. I had an awning that was moved all the way to the left. So it was rubbing on the left, all the way down and back up. I had to figure out how to move it over to the center where it wouldn't hit the left or right side as it came down and went back up.

I had another awning that when it initially would start, it would start, but it wouldn't come. It would catch and I had to assist it to come down for a couple of inches. Then it took off on its own after that. So some little tweaks and twerks sometimes need to be worked out and can be more of a pain in the butt than needed. Sometimes they just happen to work just great the way they're supposed to. I happen to get something that didn't work great this time. I installed five of them and I had issue with three of them. But overall, it is a good product when working correctly.

Whenever you get something damaged, it may not be against SunSetter. It may be against the people who are delivering that they throw things around and do things. One of my tubes was open on the end and you could tell how they tried to push it back in, and it was kind of squashed. They threw it back in there, covered it up so people wouldn't know, and delivered it.

The adjustment for the remote control to get it to work is a little more than a normal person can handle. My customer had a hard time trying to do it. She was an older customer. I had to teach her how to do it because there are so many steps for her to grasp how to reset it to go down lower and stay lower all the time, or how to reset it to only go down a quarter way where it just blocks the sun and she can still enjoy the view. She had a hard time remembering and learning the process. So the process of the automation could be done a little simpler and that would reduce the rate on it.

When you consider the price of the shade, which is close to 1,000, there's a lot of work there. I do machine work as a hobby and metal has gone sky-high through the roof. I'm willing to bet that the biggest part of the cost in that device was the housing for it compared to the fabric and the internals in it. So, it is what it is. I didn't see any other companies that marketed as high-quality products. I go for quality always.

Some people try and make their websites so fancy to be appealing. But in the process of doing that, it makes it very difficult to navigate it. But I didn't have any trouble navigating SunSetter’s website at all. I found exactly what I was looking for. But the listings for installation fees are not listed on the website, which might be a negative from the standpoint of enticing people. It's up to them, whether they wanna have it professionally installed or they wanna do it themselves. The installation fee was 300 bucks. If you consider whoever's gonna install it, typically, it's gonna have two people that have to drive wherever they're going. There's a lot of expense involved in just getting to and from the job site plus lost time in between installations. So, 300 is fair.

One of the reasons that I like the SunSetter is because it's going to go on the front porch of my house. I'm in Pensacola, on the water, and every year, we get hit by a hurricane. I have the comfort of knowing that when I retract that shade up into that housing if a storm comes along, I don't have to worry about it. Often, when you see things advertised, you'll see shades out and then they always use California or one of these places where the climate and the scenery are beautiful. But if you live in Florida, we focus on storm prevention in everything that we buy.

When I built my house, I put a standing seam metal roof on there, which has got the highest wind load standards of all roofs. And the only reason I spent the extra money was because we get hit by hurricanes. Those shades by SunSetter are appealing to people who live on the coastlines that are subjected to storms. I don't recall seeing anything in there discussing that it's durable from a storm standpoint. And you gotta be careful doing that because some joker will sue you because it fell off of a tornado. But that's a chance you take.