Why will my shutter louvres no longer stay where I put them?

How louvre tension is meant to work

In most quality shutters the tension comes from a screw or cam housed in the stile, the vertical frame member either side of the louvres. Tightening it increases the friction on the louvre pins, which is why a well made shutter can be adjusted years after installation without taking anything apart.

Cheaper panels sometimes rely on the pin fit alone with no adjuster at all. If there is no tension screw to turn, there is no adjustment to make, and that is a design limit rather than a fault that developed.

The usual causes, in the order we find them

Simple settling is first. A shutter operated several times a day for a few years will loosen slightly, and a quarter turn on the tension screw restores it. Second is timber movement: a bathroom or a south facing bay puts the stile through humidity and heat cycles, the wood shrinks a fraction, and the pin housing loses its grip.

Third is a bent or worn louvre pin, usually on a single louvre rather than the whole bank, often after something has caught it. Fourth, on very wide panels, is simple leverage. A long louvre carries more weight at its centre, so the same tension holds it less firmly than it would a short one.

• Whole panel sagging evenly: tension has settled, usually adjustable.
• One louvre only: a bent or worn pin on that louvre.
• Worst in a bathroom or south facing room: humidity or heat movement in the stile.
• Only the widest panel affected: leverage, and a sign the panel was specified too wide.

What is safe to try, and what is not

If your shutters have visible tension screws in the stiles, a small tightening turn is a reasonable thing to try, and turning it back costs nothing if it makes no difference. Work in small increments and test the louvres after each one, because over tightening makes the louvres stiff enough to be unpleasant to use and puts strain on the pins.

What we would avoid is unscrewing the panel from its frame, or attempting to remove a louvre. Louvres are captive between the stiles and removing one usually means separating the frame, which is a workshop job rather than a stepladder job.

When adjustment will not hold

If a stile has swollen and shrunk repeatedly, the pin housing can widen to the point where friction cannot be restored. This shows up as tension that holds for a few weeks then disappears again. In that case the honest answer is a replacement panel rather than repeated adjustment.

It is also worth checking the material choice against the room. Solid hardwood in a steam heavy en suite is asking a lot of the timber. For those rooms we specify moisture resistant ranges, precisely so this failure does not repeat.

Our position on shutters we did not fit

We install plantation shutters throughout East Kent and provide a lifetime product guarantee on selected shutter ranges, so a tension issue on one of ours is straightforwardly our problem to resolve. On shutters fitted by someone else we will still look, tell you whether there is an adjuster to turn, and give you an honest view on whether adjustment will hold.

If you are near Hythe, the High Street showroom is the quickest way to compare how a properly tensioned louvre should feel. It is a more useful test than any description on a page.