Storm Protection Guide
Storm shutters: what the term actually means
We get asked from time to time for storm shutters, usually by people living somewhere exposed enough to have watched a window flex in a gale. It is a completely reasonable request. Working out how to answer it properly turned out to be much harder than we expected, and what we found is worth writing down.
The short answer
There is no British Standard bearing the title "storm shutter", and we have found no UK building requirement, in Scotland or elsewhere, that calls for one.
We could not find one, so we asked. On 28 July 2026 the Door and Hardware Federation, the body responsible for pedestrian and vehicular shutters, told us that "the term 'storm shutter' is not itself a recognised UK certification category and there is no dedicated British Standard bearing that title", and that the UK does not have the same requirements as the United States regarding impact and debris protection on shutters. That reply reached us through the British Blind and Shutter Association, of which we are a member. The building regulation half of the sentence above is our own reading rather than theirs, because that was not what we asked them.
There are British Standards covering shutters. BS EN 13659 is the performance standard for external shutters, and it covers several separate characteristics, wind resistance among them, each declared on its own line with its own test method behind it.
One note on how this page is written, so it does not read as evasion. We have not bought the text of every standard named here. Where we have not read something, we say so rather than describe it. That happens a few times below, and it is deliberate.
A wind class is not declared by a UKCA or CE mark. It is declared in a document called a Declaration of Performance, and the mark tells you that document exists. The document is the thing to ask for. We say that with some feeling, because it is exactly how we finally got a figure for one of our own products, and we will come back to that below.
Impact is one of the characteristics that can be declared, under a separate standard, EN 13330:2013. We found it named on our own supplier's paperwork while we were writing this page. We do not hold the text of it, so we are not going to tell you what it measures, and in particular we will not tell you whether it bears any relation to the wind-borne debris a storm throws. Before we found it, we had asked the British Blind and Shutter Association whether any UK or European impact regime for shutters exists at all. They went to the Door and Hardware Federation, and the answer above is what came back. It did not address EN 13330, so we still do not know what that standard measures. We are leaving that gap open rather than filling it with a guess. It does not change what we would tell you, because whatever EN 13330 turns out to test, a bare "performance achieved" with no class and no figure is not something anyone should rely on.
What we can say is that the number this market leads with is wind pressure. The thing most people picture when they say "storm shutter", a barrier that stops a flying roof slate going through the glass, is tested and certified as a matter of routine under a different regime, one that exists mainly in the United States and the Caribbean.
If you want the practical answer before the detail: we could not find a certified storm shutter you can buy and have fitted in Scotland. You can certainly buy something sold under that heading, at a published price, today. What we could not find anywhere in the UK is a published price with a weather certification attached to it. Our own external shutters carry declared European wind classes, which is a real answer to the wind question and not an answer to the flying debris question. On an exposed opening the wall and the fixings decide the outcome more than the shutter does. All of that is set out below.
So when a UK company describes something as a storm shutter, that phrase carries no agreed meaning. It might sit behind serious testing. It might describe the weather the product is intended for. The words alone will not tell you which.
First, what counts as a storm?
The Beaufort scale still does this job well, but there is a trap in it that catches almost everybody.
| Beaufort force | Description | Mean wind speed |
|---|---|---|
| 8 | Gale | 39 to 46 mph |
| 9 | Severe gale | 47 to 54 mph |
| 10 | Storm | 55 to 63 mph |
| 11 | Violent storm | 64 to 72 mph |
| 12 | Hurricane force | 73 mph and above |
The Beaufort scale, at the standard published mean wind speeds for each force.
The trap: Beaufort describes the average wind, not the gusts inside it. A gust is a short peak sitting on top of the average wind behind it, and the peak is always the bigger number.
So a gust figure and a Beaufort force are not the same measurement, and one cannot simply be read off the other. Converting a peak gust back into a mean depends on terrain, height and exposure. The Eurocode BS EN 1991-1-4 handles that relationship in the design direction, and going the other way is properly a job for a wind engineer rather than a shading company with a rule of thumb. What we can say without any arithmetic at all is that a gust above 73mph is at the speed that would be hurricane force if it were the average, and that is well beyond what most external shading is built for.
The other thing worth understanding is that wind load does not rise in step with wind speed. It rises with the square of it. Double the wind speed and you roughly quadruple the force on whatever is standing in its way.
That is why a product that copes beautifully with a blustery day can be nowhere near what a genuine storm demands. The gap is far wider than the numbers make it sound.
How shutters are actually tested
Two systems are usually contrasted here, and the contrast is genuinely useful, as long as you do not push it too far. We will show you where it breaks down in a moment, because our own supplier's paperwork breaks it.
The European system
Wind pressure classes, and more besides
External shutters are covered by BS EN 13659, external blinds and awnings by BS EN 13561. Wind resistance is tested using the method in EN 1932.
From what is published about that method, pressure is applied across the whole face, positive and negative, and the product is rated on a scale from class 0 to class 6. We have not bought the text, so everything we say about the method here comes from published industry sources and from first-principles physics rather than from the standard itself. Where we give you a figure, we can point at where it came from.
Impact and durability are separate characteristics, with their own standards and their own lines on a declaration. A wind class covers none of them.
The US system
Approval numbers, published up front
Hurricane shutters in the United States are approved against building-code routes rather than a European product class. The manufacturer page we looked at names the Florida Building Code and its High-Velocity Hurricane Zone provisions, a Miami-Dade approval and a Texas Department of Insurance approval. We have not opened any of those documents, so we are not going to tell you what test sits behind them.
What we have seen is a manufacturer publishing its approval numbers openly on its own product page, under headings its page calls a Miami-Dade Notice of Approval, a Florida Building Code approval and a Texas Department of Insurance approval.
The point: in that market the approval numbers are the sales pitch, and they are weather approvals. The UK listing we looked at led with approval numbers too. They were security ones.
The two things a European wind class cannot tell you
It says nothing about impact. A wind class is a pressure rating. Flying debris is not pressure, it is concentrated energy arriving at one point very quickly. Impact is covered by a separate European standard, EN 13330, and it is declared separately. So if a shutter's paperwork gives you a wind class, that tells you nothing at all about what happens when something hits it, and you would need to look for the impact line specifically. This is also where the neat two-systems story breaks down, because our own supplier's declaration carries a European impact line.
It says nothing about how long the thing lasts under a storm. The wind test applies pressure and checks the shutter still works at the end of it. A real storm is hours of pressure building and reversing, which is what works fixings loose and fatigues joints. Europe does have a separate standard here, EN 14201, and our own supplier's declaration carries a class under it, recorded as mechanical endurance, tilting. We have not read that standard either, so we will not tell you what its test involves. What we can say is that it is a different characteristic on a different line from the wind class, and that nothing on the declaration addresses hours of storm loading.
There is a further subtlety worth knowing, because it cuts the other way and it is unfair to the products otherwise. A wind class is the pressure at which the shutter must still work, meaning it opens, closes and is not permanently deformed. It is not the point at which it fails. There is a separate, higher safety pressure it also has to survive without becoming dangerous. A class 3 shutter does not fall apart at the class 3 pressure. So treat a class as a declared minimum, not as a margin to rely on. We have not bought the standard that sets out the safety pressures, so we cannot tell you how much headroom sits above the number, and neither can anyone who has not read it.
And before anyone reads a class 6 as a storm rating. The scale is defined by pressure, not by wind speed. Class 0 means no wind claim at all, and from there it runs to roughly 400 N/m² at class 6. Going from class 3 to class 6 is under four times the pressure, and because load rises with the square of speed, that is less than double the wind speed. Each class is a declared floor rather than a ceiling, which is exactly why we are not going to hang a Beaufort force or an mph figure on the top of it, and why you should be wary of anyone who does. What matters is what the scale was built for, which is grading how a shutter behaves under steady pressure. No point on it is a hurricane rating, because it was never written to answer that question.
That is not a hypothetical worry. One UK supplier publishes a table doing exactly this, converting these class numbers straight into mph, and topping out at a figure that would be hurricane force on the Beaufort table further up this page. We are not going to tell you it is wrong, because we have not bought the standard and that is not ours to certify. What we will tell you is that we could not reconcile those speeds with the class pressures, that no standard is named anywhere beside the table, and that the gap between it and our own reading is not small. When a number that large is offered with no document behind it, ask for the document.
What one UK listing led with, and what it tells you
Here is the thing that surprised us most, and it explains a great deal.
We looked closely at one UK listing, for a rolling shutter sold under the same product name on both sides of the Atlantic, by a US manufacturer and by a UK supplier. We should be careful here: all we have established is a shared name. The UK listing never names the US manufacturer, and we have not been able to match the two on specification, so these may or may not be the same shutter. What is worth looking at is not the product. It is the two completely different vocabularies used to sell it.
The US manufacturer's page leads with hurricane performance, and gives the approval numbers: Miami-Dade 23-1010.06 and 23-1010.07, Florida Building Code approval FL39156-R4, and Texas Department of Insurance approval SHU-243. We did not find a European wind class anywhere on it, which is what you would expect for a product sold into that market.
We expected the UK listing to be thin on certification. It was not. It leads with burglary resistance tested to BR2 STS 202 by an independent test house, at specified sizes, which is the same size caveat we ask you to demand of everyone including us. It shows Secured by Design, the UK police initiative, and an LPCB badge. The wind class appears as a single line in a long specification list.
Neither page is hiding anything. They are answering different questions. In Florida, the question a shutter has to answer is "will it survive the hurricane". On this UK listing, the certification on show is about burglary. Both are rigorous. Only one of them is about weather. We have since read two more UK suppliers selling under storm and hurricane headings, in full, and found the same split both times: debris protection described in the sales copy, and security certification, sometimes with fire alongside it, as the only thing actually tested and published. Three is still not a survey of the market, and we are not presenting it as one. It is enough to say the pattern is not a one-off.
The weather information is on that page. It is just quiet. A wind class, stated as class 5, sits in the specification list, and a line at the foot confirms CE marking. Two lines, against a headline of security. We are showing you where this information tends to sit, and we found exactly the same thing when we went looking at our own supplier: the wind data was not in the brochure, not in the specifications and not in the price list, and it took a request through our supplier to a factory on another continent to produce it.
One thing we will not do is line that class 5 up against our own numbers. It is a different product, on a different span, declared on different paperwork, and we do not know the panel size behind either figure. Comparing them would be the exact mistake this page is asking you not to make.
The practical consequence for you as a buyer: a wind class tells you nothing about impact resistance, and a security rating tells you nothing about either. BR2 means the product resisted somebody working at it with common hand tools and levers. That is a slow, leveraged, local force. A roof slate carried by a storm is not. If impact resistance is what you want, ask for it by name, and then ask what the line actually means, because it can appear on a declaration as a bare "performance achieved" with no class and no number.
How our own products stack up
We would rather tell you plainly than let you assume. We supply two external products that get asked about in this context, and neither one is a certified storm shutter. Here is exactly where each stands.
Portchester external aluminium shutters
Architectural aluminium louvred shutters, hinged into a four-sided frame. Individual panels are limited in width: 900mm on a hinged installation, less on a bi-fold, or up to 1050mm on a sliding by-pass track. A wide opening is therefore covered by several panels rather than one large one.
They are locking shutters, and the lock matters here for a practical reason. In windy or stormy conditions the panel should be closed inside the frame with the lock engaged. That is how the panel is held into the frame, rather than left to work against its hinges, and it keeps the window fully covered. What the lock does not do is give the shutter a wind rating. Wind is a spread load carried by the panel, the hinges and ultimately the wall, and no piece of hardware on the panel converts that into a tested rating.
We asked our supplier for the test data behind this product, and on 28 July 2026 we got it. None of the three product documents we hold contains any wind data at all, which is why we had to ask. The manufacturer sent a Declaration of Performance, reference AS1/2017, issued in September 2017. It declares class 6 for a hinged installation, and class 5 for a bi-fold or a by-pass track, against EN 1932. That is a considerably better answer than we expected, and better than our own internal notes had credited the product with. We will show the document to anyone who asks for it.
Now the parts we would rather tell you than have you find out, because there are five of them.
One: the declaration does not name the range. It identifies the product type generically, as aluminium adjustable louvre shutters for internal and external use. It came to us from our supplier in direct answer to a question about this specific product and we have taken it as covering it, but we have asked for that in writing and we will say so here when we have it. We have been caught by a shared product name before, which is precisely why we are flagging it rather than quietly banking the number.
Two: it does not state the panel size the classes were achieved at. We asked for it, along with the two test pressures, and neither came back. Look again at question 2 in our list below, the one where we tell you a rating quoted without a size is close to meaningless. We are not going to apply that test to everyone else and exempt ourselves.
Three: it is a self-declaration. It is issued under what the regulations call System 4, which means the manufacturer is responsible for its own initial type testing and factory production control, with no independent body verifying either. That is lawful and normal for this class of product, and it does not mean no laboratory was involved. It does mean nobody outside the manufacturer checked, and that is not the same thing as a third-party certificate.
Four: the wind class is not the only line on it. Impact resistance, under EN 13330:2013, is declared as "performance achieved". No class, no number, no result. Resistance of the mechanism holding the shutter is declared the same way, with no class either. We are not going to tell you what that characteristic tests, because we have not read the clause behind it, and we are not going to assume it is the same thing as the lock we described above. And mechanical endurance is given as tilting class 3, a louvre durability figure under a different standard again. That last one deserves a confession: a "class 3" had been sitting in our own internal notes for years, described as a wind class. It never was one. This document is where that finally got settled, and it is a fair illustration of how easily one of these numbers gets carried into the wrong column.
Five: it dates from 2017, and it is a European document. It was signed in September 2017 under the European Construction Products Regulation, naming a UK company as the manufacturer's authorised representative here. We have asked whether it is still the current declaration and whether anything has changed for the British market since. We have not had an answer yet and we are not going to guess at one. If we are going to tell you to ask for the document, we have to ask whether ours is the right version of it.
There is also a wrinkle we have not resolved. The paperwork rates the hinged version highest, but the factory's own advice for high-wind sites is the sliding by-pass, because they can add wheels and guides to it, and the same document rates that a class lower. Field experience and paperwork point in opposite directions. There is a plausible explanation, and it is not about size: panel width does not sort it, because the bi-fold is the narrowest of the three configurations and shares the lower class. What differs is the load path. A hinged panel locks into a fixed frame, while bi-fold and by-pass panels lock into the adjacent panel and hang from a top track. That would explain the declaration. It would not explain the factory's advice. We have put the question back to them rather than pick whichever answer suits us.
Now the thing about living with these on a coastal site, which matters more than the class does. The factory's own biggest concern, raised twice without our asking, is corrosion of the lock: it is the first component to go, especially if it is not used and cleaned regularly. On a coastal elevation the supplier's specification calls for cleaning and lubricating every one to four weeks, against three to six months inland, and their three year exterior warranty is conditional on that being done. It also excludes act of God, so it is not a storm damage policy. Neither is your statutory position, to be clear. Your rights against us under the Consumer Rights Act cover both halves of the job: the goods being of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described, and the fitting being carried out with reasonable care and skill. Those rights stand whatever any guarantee says, and no wording of ours can take them away. What they are not is storm insurance. What all of that means is that nobody's warranty is the reason to buy this for an exposed elevation. That is a real ownership commitment and you should hear it before you order rather than after.
And it is louvred, which matters more than any of the above. A louvred panel is not a sealed barrier: air and water pass through it, so the glass behind still meets the weather. A wind class describes the panel staying put and staying operable under pressure. It does not make an adjustable louvre into a shield over your glass. This is a shading, privacy and weather-durability product built robustly for outdoor use, and now with a declared wind class behind it. What it is not is a sealed barrier over glass, and no wind class changes that. Its declaration does carry an impact line, recorded only as "performance achieved" with no class and no number. We will not tell you what that line means until we know. What we will tell you is that we do not present a louvred panel as debris protection, and nothing on that declaration changes it.
Luxaflex external roller shutters
A solid curtain of interlocking aluminium slats running in side guides. Luxaflex rate these at up to wind class 3, depending on size, so which class applies to your opening depends on how big it is. Being straight about the paperwork: when this page first went up, that figure came from the manufacturer's published specification, which gave us the class but did not name the standard behind it, and we did not hold a Declaration of Performance. We said so, and we said we were asking for the document. We asked, and in August 2026 our supplier produced it. The declaration names the standard as EN 13659:2004 and declares resistance of wind load as class 0 to 3 across the range, which is consistent with the up to class 3 figure we had been quoting. What it still does not do is tell you which class a given size lands on, and wind resistance is the only characteristic declared on it, so it says nothing about impact. By the standard of question 1 below, that was a gap on our side and it is now closed.
It is worth knowing what a class 3 means, because "3 out of 6" sounds middling and it is not what most people would guess. On the European ladder, class 3 is a nominal test pressure of at least 110 N/m², against roughly 400 N/m² at class 6, so around a quarter of it. We used to have to assume Luxaflex meant that ladder, because it is the only one in general use for shading, and their specification did not say. The declaration settles it: EN 13659 is where those classes are set out. We are deliberately not converting either figure into a wind speed, for the reason given further up.
Our own specification rule for coastal and elevated sites is to specify one class above what such a site would ordinarily call for. On an ordinary exposed or coastal site that points at class 4, and class 3 is the top of this range. So we do not present these as a storm rating.
Structurally it is the more interesting of the two, because a solid interlocking slat curtain is one of the forms genuine hurricane shutters take, alongside accordion shutters and bolt-on storm panels. The shape is in the right family. What is missing is any impact result we can point at, not the concept.
Closed over the glass, a roller shutter is a substantial physical layer, and it does a great deal besides: insulation, room darkening, noise reduction, and a solid aluminium layer between the weather and the glass. What we cannot tell you is the wind speed at which it stops doing that job, because the tested class describes the pressure at which it must still operate, not the pressure at which it fails, and we do not hold the failure figure. There is a more immediate point about how these behave in high wind, and it cuts against the product, so we have corrected it here rather than leave the earlier wording standing. On exposed sites they are paired with a wind sensor, and above a set wind speed that sensor retracts the shutter automatically. It is there to protect the shutter. The consequence is that the product rolls itself up in the very conditions that prompt most people to ask about it. Every external product we fit behaves this way, with one exception: the Portchester louvred shutters, which are manual and lock closed, so they stay where you put them.
One thing worth sitting with, because it cuts against the obvious answer. Our louvred shutters carry the higher declared class, and the roller shutter, the one actually shaped like a hurricane shutter, carries the lower one. If you were picking on appearance you would pick the other way round. To be clear, that is not a ranking, and the two numbers are not comparable: one is declared without a tested size, the other varies with size and is declared as a range across a family of models. That is the point rather than a result. The number and the thing you are picturing are not measuring the same quality, and neither of them is measuring debris.
Where we actually sit
There are roughly four rungs on this ladder:
- Nothing at all
- An external shutter with no declared wind performance. A great deal of external shading sits here, and you will not know it unless you ask
- An external shutter with a European wind class from the manufacturer. Both of ours sit here, at different points on the scale and on different kinds of paperwork: the Luxaflex roller shutters at up to class 3, size dependent, from a manufacturer's declaration to EN 13659:2004 giving class 0 to 3 across the range, and the louvred shutters at class 5 or class 6 depending on how they are hung, from a declaration that states no tested panel size and carries no third-party assessment
- A shutter with an independently certified impact result you can be shown
We occupy the third rung, and we are telling you so. If what you need is the fourth, we would rather point you towards it than sell you the third and let you believe it is the fourth. And note that the third rung is about a declared pressure class. Even at the top of that scale, it is still answering the wind question and not the debris question.
One thing we should say plainly, because it is the reason people read this page. On an ordinary exposed or coastal site, where the plain reading is class 3, our own rule is to specify one class higher, so class 4. Our louvred shutters are declared above that, hinged. That is worth having. It is not the end of the question, for three reasons. The declaration states no panel size, and on a large opening a class without a size settles very little. The class is a pressure, and if yours is a site where 70 or 80mph gusts are normal, nothing on this page tells you whether that pressure is enough, because converting a gust into a design pressure at your wall is a wind engineer's job. And it says nothing at all about debris. So the declaration is a real answer to a narrow question, and we would rather you knew how narrow it is.
The part almost nobody talks about: the fixings
You can buy the best shutter in the world and it will do nothing for you if the wall will not hold it.
This is not a detail. In the American system an approval does not certify a shutter on its own. It certifies an assembly: the shutter, the specified fixings, at the specified spacing, into a specified substrate, up to a specified size. Change any one of those and the test result no longer describes what you have installed.
Which raises an obvious problem when a product tested for American construction is fitted to a Scottish one. Fixing into rubble-filled stone, into a rendered cavity wall, or into a modern timber frame are three completely different engineering problems, and none of them is the one the shutter was tested against.
So on an exposed site the questions that actually decide the outcome are these. What is the wall made of? How deep is the reveal? Is there sound material behind the render to fix into? Can the anchors carry the load, and the pull-out force when the wind reverses?
A shutter that comes off the wall in a violent storm has not just failed to protect the glass. It has become a large piece of flying metal. That is why we will not put a price on an exposed job from a photograph alone. Photographs are fine for a first indication on an ordinary window. On an exposed coastal opening the wall decides the outcome, and we survey before we commit to anything.
We are not the only ones saying this. For a property exposed to the North Sea with high reported gusts, the Door and Hardware Federation's technical team recommended three things before any decision: a site-specific wind load assessment to BS EN 1991-1-4, selection of a shutter with the highest available verified EN 13659 wind classification, and "independent review of the proposed fixing arrangement and supporting substrate by a suitably competent engineer where the exposure is exceptional". Two of those three are about the wall rather than the shutter.
Now apply the middle one to us, because it would be convenient not to. The DHF say verified. The declaration we hold for our own louvred shutters is a manufacturer's self-declaration under System 4, nobody independent checked it, it states no panel size, and its wind row is declared against EN 1932 rather than EN 13659. It is a real document and we will show it to you. It is not what the DHF mean by verified, and we would rather say so than let their recommendation do quiet work on our behalf.
Being equally clear about the limits of our own survey. We assess the substrate and specify fixings from experience. We do not carry out wind load or anchorage calculations, and where a wall is marginal the right answer is a structural engineer rather than us. On the exposure the DHF was asked about, that is not us being cautious, it is what the trade body recommends. For what it is worth, we asked our own supplier for a minimum substrate to go with their fixing specification and they did not give us one. That tells you how much of this sits with the installer rather than the maker, which is the reason we labour the point.
What to ask any supplier, including us
If you are being sold something described as a storm shutter, these five questions will tell you very quickly what you are dealing with. A supplier who can answer them has done the work. A supplier who answers with a headline wind speed and no standard has not.
- Which standard was it tested to? A named standard, not an adjective. And check what that standard is for, because a security rating is not a weather rating.
- What result did it achieve, and at what size? Ratings usually drop as the product gets bigger, so a rating quoted without a size is close to meaningless.
- Was it tested for impact, or only for pressure? These are different tests with different standards behind them. An impact line can appear on a declaration as a bare "performance achieved" with no class and no number, which tells you a box was ticked and nothing about the result. Ask what the line actually means.
- What is the fixing specification, and what substrate does it assume? Then ask whether your wall actually matches it.
- Can I see the test report or the approval document? If it exists, you can be shown it, and it will have a number on it.
Where this leaves you
If you live somewhere genuinely exposed and you want tested protection against flying debris, the approvals we have actually seen published by number are American ones. We are not in a position to tell you whether the European impact standard offers an equivalent route, because we have not read it and have not yet had an answer on it. Products with those American approvals exist. Whether one can be bought and fitted in Scotland with the approval still meaning something, we have not been able to establish.
There are certainly UK companies selling under storm and hurricane headings, and you will find them in about ten seconds. We went back and read two of them properly, in full, rather than skimming for keywords. Both describe protection from flying debris in their sales copy. Neither names a weather standard against it, or an impact standard, or a test house, or a document you could ask to see. One of the two asserts that its shutters are tested and rated to wind classes, but does not say which standard those classes come from. Neither publishes an impact result of any kind.
What both of them do publish, at length and on dedicated pages, is security certification, with fire certification alongside it. Named schemes, named test houses, ratings explained rating by rating. Those are real and independently tested. They are about burglars and fire. On one of the two, every product in the hurricane range is graded by its burglary rating, and on the listing and on the product pages we opened, none of them is graded by a wind class at all.
We are not naming them, and that is deliberate. We have not tested their products, we do not hold their paperwork, and a shutter with no published weather certification is not the same thing as a bad shutter. It may well be an excellent one, and there is no UK weather certification for them to hold in the first place, which is the point the Door and Hardware Federation made to us. The observation is narrower than a criticism: the words on the outside of the box are not doing the work you think they are doing. If a supplier can show you an impact result, ask for it, and you will know more than any of these pages told us.
One correction to something this page used to say. We previously told you we could not find a published price from any UK route, and that these were bespoke enquiry items rather than off-the-shelf goods. That was wrong and we have removed it. You can find published UK prices under a hurricane shutter heading without difficulty, from a few hundred pounds to several thousand, and you can put one in a basket. What we could not find, and still cannot, is a published UK price with a weather certification attached to it. That is a much narrower claim than the one we made, and it is the one we should have made in the first place.
It is also worth remembering that a shutter is not the only answer. With no shutter fitted, the glass takes the weather first, and how the window unit is specified and fixed into the structure matters at least as much as anything hung in front of it. On a genuinely extreme exposure that is a conversation for a structural glazing engineer, not a shading company.
And if your exposure is serious but not extreme, which covers most of coastal Scotland, a well specified and properly fixed external shutter or roller shutter is a genuinely worthwhile piece of protection. It just is not a hurricane shutter, and we would rather you heard that from us first.
Corrected 9 August 2026, second correction. This page used to tell you we could not find a published price from any UK route, and that a storm shutter was a bespoke enquiry item rather than something you buy off a shelf. That was simply wrong. It came from us checking a handful of UK companies too lightly in July, writing down what we thought we had found, and not going back. We have now read two of them properly and in full. You can buy something sold as a hurricane shutter in the UK today, at a published price, from a website with a basket on it. Neither of them publishes a weather test behind it. We have rewritten that section, and we have said what we actually found rather than softening it, because the original claim would have made a reader who spent thirty seconds on Google think this page had not done its homework. On that specific sentence, it had not.
Corrected 9 August 2026. An enquiry from an exposed site asked us a question this page had answered badly. The roller shutter section used to say that on exposed sites these can be paired with a wind sensor so the shutter closes automatically. That was the wrong way round. Above a set wind speed the sensor retracts the shutter, to protect the shutter, which means the product removes itself from the glass in the conditions that prompt the question. Our Portchester louvred shutters are the only external product we fit that does not do this. We have corrected the section above and left the old wording described here rather than quietly deleted, because it pointed a reader in exactly the wrong direction on the thing this page exists to get right.
A note on this page, last reviewed 9 August 2026. When we first published this we said we had asked two questions and would report back. Both have now come back, and we have rewritten the page around what they said rather than waiting for a tidier version. Here is the first. Our supplier came back with the manufacturer's Declaration of Performance, and it is better than we expected, so we have rewritten the section on our louvred shutters above. We had said we held no wind rating for them. We now do: class 6 hinged, class 5 on a bi-fold or by-pass track. We have kept every caveat in place rather than tidying them away, because the document does not name the range, does not give the panel size behind those classes, and carries no third-party assessment. The second question went to the British Blind and Shutter Association, of which we are a member, and they took it to the Door and Hardware Federation, who have more experience of metal shutters than the BBSA. The DHF confirmed there is no recognised UK certification category called a storm shutter and no British Standard of that name, which is the answer this page was built around, and it is a better source for it than us. What they did not address is EN 13330, so we still cannot tell you what that standard measures, and we have left that gap showing rather than papering over it. We would rather publish a page with a question still on it than wait until we can present a tidy one.
Related reading: external aluminium shutters and external roller shutters.
Exposed site? Talk to us before you buy anything
We survey exposed and coastal properties properly, and we will tell you plainly what a shutter will and will not do for you. If what you need is something we do not supply, we will say so.