Blind cord safety in Albury homes.

Why this is regulated at all.

A looped blind cord sits at exactly the height of a small child's neck, it does not break under a child's weight, and it is silent. The ACCC has recorded child deaths in Australia from looped window-covering cords, and that is the reason there is a mandatory standard rather than a voluntary guideline. We are not raising it to upsell anyone. We raise it because on a decent proportion of the older Albury homes we walk into, there is a chain hanging free in a child's bedroom with no tensioner anywhere on the wall, and the owner has no idea that is a compliance failure as well as a hazard.

The standard, in plain English.

The rule is the Competition and Consumer (Corded Internal Window Coverings) Safety Standard 2014, made under Australian Consumer Law and enforced by the ACCC. It applies to anyone who supplies or installs a corded internal window covering. The substance of it is short: a loose cord or chain must not be able to form a loop that a child can reach; the cord must be held clear by a tension device or cleat that is mechanically fixed to the wall or architrave; that device has to be installed at the time of installation rather than left in a bag on the bench; and the required warning labels have to be present on the product. Corded blinds remain perfectly legal. Corded blinds fitted without those measures do not.

The three failures we see in Albury houses.

• No tensioner at all. The most common. The chain simply hangs. Often the tensioner was in the box and never fitted.
• A stick-on tensioner that has let go. Adhesive does not survive a Riverina summer against a sun-warmed reveal. It needs a screw.
• A tensioner fitted, then the chain lengthened. Usually after a repair. A new chain fitted to the old clutch, longer than the original, and the tensioner no longer takes up the slack.

Who is actually responsible.

If you buy blinds from us, the obligation is ours and it is discharged at installation. If you buy online and fit them yourself, you are the installer, and the obligation is yours, which is a point almost nobody makes when selling DIY blinds. If you are a landlord supplying blinds in a rental, the obligation is yours and not your tenant's, and it does not lapse after the first tenancy. That last one matters a lot around Albury and Wodonga given how much of the housing stock is tenanted, and it is covered in more detail on our rental property blinds page. If a handyman replaced a chain between leases and left it loose, the blind is non-compliant now even though it was fine when it was first fitted.

The furniture problem nobody thinks about.

Compliance is measured against what a child can reach, and children do not stand on the floor. A cord that is safely out of reach above an empty floor becomes reachable the moment a cot, a bed, a bookshelf or a toy box goes under the window. This is the most common way a compliant window quietly becomes a hazardous one, and it usually happens at a nursery setup or a bedroom reshuffle, months after anyone thought about blinds. When you rearrange a child's room, look up at the window before you push the cot against the wall.

The cheap way out: just go cordless.

The honest engineering answer is that the safest cord is the one that does not exist. A cordless spring-operated roller blind typically adds only about $20 to $60 per blind over the corded version, on a base of $120 to $320 made-to-measure. For a nursery or a child's bedroom, that is a trivial amount of money to remove the hazard class entirely, and it is what we recommend by default. Motorised blinds are the other cord-free option at $150 to $350 per blind plus $150 to $350 once for a hub, and they earn that on tall stairwell and high-level windows where nobody can safely reach a chain anyway. Note that hardwired motors are electrical work: in NSW that means a licensed electrician working to AS/NZS 3000, and the drives themselves are covered by AS/NZS 60335.2.97. Battery motors sidestep all of that.

Worked example: making a house compliant this week.

A 1990s Lavington home with two young kids and nine corded blinds. Four have working tensioners, three have none, and two have stick-on tensioners that have fallen off. The immediate fix is five screw-fixed tension devices, which is a small job and can be done the same visit as anything else. The better fix for the two children's bedrooms is swapping those blinds to cordless spring rollers, roughly $280 to $760 for the pair at 2026 rates, and leaving the rest corded but properly tensioned. Total is a few hundred dollars and it removes the actual risk rather than just satisfying the label. If a blind is already faulty, do both jobs at once, and see Albury blind repairs for what the mechanical side costs.

A three-minute audit you can do tonight.

Walk the house. At every corded blind and curtain, ask three questions. Can the cord or chain form a loop? Can a child standing on the floor, or on a bed, or on a chair, reach it? Is there a tension device screwed to the wall and actually holding the chain taut? If any of those answers is wrong, that window needs attention, and a tension device is a few dollars, not a project. Then look at the furniture under every window with a cord. That audit is free and takes less time than reading this page. If you would rather we did it, we will check every window as a matter of course at a free measure, and there is broader room-by-room guidance in how to choose window furnishings.

Frequently asked questions.