Roll-Down Hurricane ShuttersOak Island, NC

Oak Island, Brunswick County

What roll-down shutters cost on Oak Island, and the one problem here they solve better than anything else

Roll-down hurricane shutters on Oak Island are $52/sq ft installed for the manual crank version. A pulldown pole instead of a crank adds $400 per opening. An electric motor adds $700 per opening. The rate covers the curtain, the head box, the side tracks, stainless anchors, the permit and a design pressure calculation done on your opening rather than to a county minimum.

It is the highest-priced rigid system on our list, and on most Oak Island houses it is the wrong way to spend the budget — accordions at $38 protect the same opening for a third less. What changes the math is height. Oceanfront houses here sit on pilings, so what looks like a first-floor window from the street is ten or twelve feet up, and the bedroom glass above it is twenty. Every other system on this island is deployed by a person standing outside the opening. A roll-down is deployed from inside it.

The second case is span. A roll-down covers a wide water-facing slider in one continuous curtain with no meeting stile down the middle of your view, which is why they end up on the ocean elevation of houses that use accordions everywhere else. Mixing systems on one house is normal and we quote it that way.

We do not fit battery backup. The units are temperamental and useless without frequent recharging, which means the one time you need them is the time they have been sitting flat since last September. Every electric roll-down we install comes with a manual override crank instead. It is mechanical, it needs nothing charged, and it works with the power out — which on this island, after Isaias came ashore just up the coast at Ocean Isle in 2020, is not a hypothetical.