Roll-Down Hurricane ShuttersSouthport, NC

Southport, Brunswick County

What roll-downs cost in Southport, and the question that decides whether you need the motor

Roll-down hurricane shutters in Southport 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 includes the curtain, the head box, side tracks, stainless anchors, the permit and a per-opening design pressure calculation.

Southport carries an unusually high share of houses that are nobody’s primary address — second homes, future retirements bought early, and rentals run from somewhere else. That is the condition roll-downs were built for. A motorized system closes from a wall switch, a remote or a phone, so a house off River Road can be secured by an owner who is four hours inland and a property manager who is not in Brunswick County at all.

The other case is the river elevation. Houses facing the water down toward Bay Street and the harbor tend to have their widest glass pointed at the view, and a wide opening is where a roll-down separates itself: one continuous curtain, no meeting stile standing in the middle of the thing you paid for. Most houses we do this way are mixed — roll-downs on two or three water-facing openings, accordions or panels everywhere else. We quote it that way on purpose.

We do not fit battery backup. The units are temperamental and useless without frequent recharging, which means the backup you are counting on has usually been sitting flat since the last time anyone thought about it. Every motorized roll-down we install ships with a manual override crank instead. It is mechanical, it needs nothing charged, and it works during an outage — which after what Florence did to Brunswick County in 2018 is not a theoretical requirement.