Hurricane ScreensWilmington, NC

Wilmington, New Hanover County

What hurricane screens cost in Wilmington, and the openings only they can cover

Hurricane screens in Wilmington are $48/sq ft installed, and motorizing an opening adds $700. The fabric is StormTex aramid, rated to ASTM E1886/E1996 — the same standard as every rigid system we fit, because a rating describes a test rather than a hurricane category.

Span is the entire reason they exist. A screen covers more than thirty feet in one piece with no post in the middle. Nothing else on our list does that. An accordion over a wide opening meets in the middle of it and a roll-down needs a head box the opening may not have the height for.

In Wilmington that means porches. The covered porches on the RiverLights riverfront, the screen enclosures in Landfall, the deep porches on the older houses off Market: these are the largest openings on the property, the ones every rigid system fails at, and the part of the house people actually use.

The second thing they do is leave the view alone. The mesh is view-through, so a porch facing the Cape Fear River still faces the river with the screens down. Anyone who has sat out a storm behind plywood understands immediately why that matters.

Motorizing at $700 an opening is not a luxury on a wide span. A thirty-foot screen is not something one person wrestles by hand with the wind already up. We do not fit battery backup, because the units are temperamental and tend to be flat on the day they are needed, and every motorized screen we install has a manual override instead.

They are not a whole-house product and we do not quote them as one. Screens on the spans that need them, rigid protection on the windows, is what almost every Wilmington quote of ours looks like.