Hey There: nothing goes up and down without a spring except it is motorized. We put child safety for our products as #1 priority and offer only Lite Rise Roller Shades or Lithium Battery Operating Roller Shades which you have to charge like your iPhone every 6 to 9 months. Lite Rise means that you pull down the roller shade on its bottom track and push it up at this too. The challenge is if you cannot reach the top of the roller shade anymore... Btw, the installation of both systems can be done within 20 minutes or so and not electrician is needed.

Why do you want shades at all? Is it to block sun or is it for privacy. I recently remodeled my condo in a high rise. I have a view that I don't want to lose but don't have privacy concerns. I do have strong Eastern light so that I want to have shades drawn in the morning until the sun moves high enough so I am not getting blinding glare - this is for comfort/not heating up excessively in the summer as well as preventing sun damage to floor and furniture. I installed film to block a high percentage of UVA. This is imperceptible. I also got shades that theoretically don't block the view. These are operated remotely as well as through an App on my iPhone. The automatic aspect is well worth it as I can't imagine having to lower and raise shades every day especially since some of them aren't really conveniently accessed. In my personal experience even though my shades are not fully opaque and are theoretically designed to let me experience the view, there is no comparison between how I experience my "view" when shades are up or down as one is totally aware there are shades versus when they are up and there is nothing between me and the view except the dirt on my windows :-)

Just to update this thread - we ended up with the Lutron Caseta shades and we are thrilled with the end result. We don't have a comparison point with Hunter Douglas and I think you can't go wrong. But for every reason we chose Lutron - the sleekness and quiet motor - we couldn't be happier. We did hard wire the windows and during construction two of the wires were cut so that was a problem. In hindsight I might have waited to order the shades after I knew we had electricity to every window confirmed. It would have been a bit incovenient but we could have ordered the battery operated shades for those windows then. Instead we had to repurchase battery operated shades for those windows after purchasing the hard wire shade. So an expensive situation. Hope this helps!

My wired solar shades (south facing windows) are Lutron and are awesome and whisper quiet. These are hard wired as it was a new build. For my vacation house I installed rechargeable battery motorized shades and like them also. Not as beautiful and quiet as the Lutron but I like that I can control the unreachable upper windows in my vaulted room. Another advantage is if you have a large quantitiy of windows (I have 9 in my master suite) the electric ones can be grouped together and opened/shut together rather than manually doing 9 seperate windows in the morning and evening. I still have manual shades in some rooms that only have one or two easily accessible windows. It really depends on your situation whether its worth the extra expense.