The materials are top flight and service were excellent especially given that my particular requirements were unusual. I am very satisfied on both counts.
My house has a gable roof facing the deck and a traditional installation would cut across an arched window above the picture window. I wanted a pair of roman shades that would follow the roof line and retract up under the soffits. At the far side the shade needed to be attached to a horizontal frame. As a result, the shades would have both a slope and a twist.
While the Shade Sail Canada had no experience with particular arrangement, they were very helpful providing answers to the many detailed questions I raised to try to determine whether this installation would work.
Installing the cables was straightforward and followed the instructions provided even with the unusual layout. Working out a system to retract the shades required some experimentation to address what were unanticipated complications that this design raised. The single attachment point for the retracting lines in the center of the shade did not work properly in part because the shade tended to fall to the lower side and in part because the upper cable was 7" longer than the lower one. The solution was to install two retracting lines on each sail - one on each side. That gives total control for retraction and holds the shade firmly in place once retracted. It also allows the shades to be tensioned when deployed with the resulting flat cover that I prefer to the scalloped look.
Retracting the shade up a slope obviously adds to the effort required to retract the shade but it is still very doable. I made a tensioning handle from a piece of wood and a clam cleat to give me greater purchase when tightening the shade in both the extended and retracted positions. My wife is small and she can do it if she needs to.
The other complication was that if you attach the retracting lines to the outboard pully, the pully housing pinches the cable when being retracted making retraction just about impossible, I ended up replacing the last pully with two shackles that slide up the cable without difficulty. I also put a swivel hanger at the end of each line to address the problem of the line twisting and developing curls and knots.
One other thing to mention is that with this arrangement, all of the lines are installed above the shade rather than below as is the usual case. This makes for an uncluttered view from underneath.
I installed the cables so that the shades would be 3" apart. That was barely enough as the shades tend to sag toward the higher cables when deployed. When retracted the bottom of the scallops overlap at the center as well. To avoid that the shades would need to be separated more. I chose to live with them overlapping as I preferred not to have a large gap between them.
In the end the shade is doing exactly what we hoped. It extends out 16' from the house, retracts relatively easily back under the soffits where it is held securely and can be tensioned to be flat when extended. Importantly for me the arched window remains unblocked.
