Summer is when the phone rings in Rooty Hill. This part of Blacktown regularly runs several degrees hotter than the coast, and the first properly hot week of the season is when shutters that were closing fine in April suddenly start catching in the rails.
We cover Rooty Hill in the 2766 postcode, from the Rooty Hill Road corridor through to the streets near the Great Western Highway, and out to Minchinbury, Eastern Creek, Doonside and the Mount Druitt side.
Most homes here are post-war and 1970s brick, with a growing number of newer duplexes on subdivided blocks. The shutters run the whole range from decades-old manual units to recent motorised installs. Which way a shutter faces tells us more about its condition than how old it is.
Shutters that sit unused for months are the ones that fail on the first hot day. Running each one fully up and down every few weeks keeps the mechanism free and shows up a problem while it is still small. If a shutter has started to catch, do not force it with the motor or keep hauling on the strap, because that turns a rail clean-out into a curtain repair. Stop, and have someone look at what is actually catching. A shutter that has not moved since last summer is worth testing now rather than in January.
