Curtain lights: sizing, hanging, and which variant you have

A curtain light is a horizontal header with vertical strands hanging from it. Two things decide whether it looks right: whether the panel proportions match the window, and whether the strands hang straight. Neither is about the lighting.

Written by the people who build the controllers inside these panels and write the apps that drive them. Last reviewed July 2026.

Six variants, three questions

We manufacture curtain lights in six category variants, and the names on the packaging look almost identical. They differ along three independent axes, and each axis has a real consequence for you.

Wired or wireless

The wireless variants are the addressable ones — colour can travel along and across the panel, and they run on Magic Lantern. The wired variants run on Lotus Lantern instead. That difference is not cosmetic: an app that does not speak your controller's protocol will never list the panel at all, no matter how well Bluetooth is working. If you are unsure which you have, the app that finds it is the one that matches.

Standard or fast

"Fast" refers to how quickly the panel updates its LEDs, not to how quickly you can hang it. The practical difference shows up in two places. Fast-moving effects — sweeps, rain, anything travelling down the strands — look smoother rather than stepped. And when you point a phone camera at the panel, a higher update rate is much less likely to produce rolling bands across the video. If you bought curtain lights mainly for photographs and video, the fast variants are the ones worth paying for. For a panel sitting on a slow colour fade in a window, you would struggle to tell them apart by eye.

Single panel or linked screen

This is the biggest functional split in the range, and the one most often bought wrong.

What a linked screen can show that a plain curtain cannot

This is the practical difference between the variants, and it is easier to see than to describe. A plain curtain light runs colour patterns down its strands. A linked screen addresses the whole surface as a grid, so it can hold a picture.

App effect previews at panel aspect ratio, not photographs. On a real curtain the strands hang with slight variation and the gaps between them are wider than the gaps within them, so a picture reads best from further back than the preview suggests. Note also that these require a screen-capable variant — a plain curtain light cannot display them at all, and no firmware update changes that.

Sizing the panel to the window

Panels are quoted as width × drop. Both matter, and the failure modes are different.

Width

Measure the opening you want lit, not the glass. If you are hanging inside the reveal, measure the reveal at its narrowest point — plaster is rarely square, and a panel 2 cm wider than the tightest point will not sit flat. If you are hanging outside on the wall, add 10–15% so the panel visually overhangs the frame rather than stopping exactly at it. A panel that ends a few centimetres short of the frame on both sides is the most common thing people regret, and it is very obvious once lit.

Drop

Decide first whether the strands should end above the sill, at the sill, or hang past it. All three are fine. What looks wrong is strands ending a hand's width short of the sill, which reads as an accident.

Strands are almost always trimmable in length but almost never extendable, so err long if you are between sizes. Before you trim anything, check whether your model is addressable — on an addressable panel the strand is a data chain, and cutting it removes everything downstream of the cut, which on some layouts means part of the next strand too. Look for marked cut points, and if there are none, do not cut.

Strand spacing and density

Two panels with the same overall dimensions can look completely different depending on how many strands they have and how many LEDs sit on each. Sparse panels read as points of light on glass. Dense panels read as a lit sheet. Neither is better, but if you are matching an existing panel, match strand count rather than overall width.

Hanging without damaging the wall

Almost all the weight is in the header and the controller, not the strands. Fix the header well and the rest looks after itself.

1. Unroll the panel and let it hang for a few hours before fixing anything. Strands arrive with packing kinks. They relax out under their own weight. Fixing a kinked panel and then waiting for it to straighten does not work — it sets that way.
2. Decide which end the controller lives at. The controller and its lead have to reach a socket, and they will hang at one end. Pick the end nearer the outlet before you fix the header, not after.
3. Fix the header at both ends first, then the middle. Adhesive hooks are fine indoors for typical panel weights — use more of them than you think, spaced evenly, so no single hook takes a concentrated load. On a tiled or gloss-painted reveal, clean with isopropyl alcohol first; adhesive fails on residue, not on weight.
4. Do not tension the strands. They are meant to hang loose. Pinning the bottom ends taut puts load into the header fixings and, on addressable panels, stresses the strand joints that carry the data line.
5. Leave a service loop at the controller. A short slack loop before the plug means you can unplug the panel without pulling on the header.

Setting up a linked screen so it behaves as one surface

This is the part that is genuinely fiddly, and it is worth knowing before you are up a ladder.

A linked screen has to be told its own shape. The controller does not know how many panels you connected or how you arranged them, so effects only span correctly once the layout has been set in the app. Two consequences follow:

• Chain order is physical. The panels form a chain from the controller outward. The panel you connect first is the first in the chain. If you hang them in a different left-to-right order than you chained them, effects will jump around the wall in a way that looks like a fault and is not.
• Orientation matters per panel. A panel hung with its header at the top and one hung upside down are addressed in opposite directions. Keep every header the same way up unless you deliberately want mirrored movement.

Our recommendation, learned from support calls: chain and configure the panels on the floor first, run one sweeping effect, confirm it travels left to right in the order you expect, then hang them in that order. Diagnosing chain order from a ladder is miserable.

Common questions

One strand is dark and the rest work

On an addressable panel, check whether the strands after it still work. If they do, the strand itself has lost power or its LEDs have failed. If everything after it is also dark, the data line is broken at the top of that strand — which is where the header joint is.

The panel shows the right colours but effects do not move

That is normally the wrong app: a general RGB app can often set brightness and a solid colour on an addressable panel while none of the travelling effects work. Check which app your controller needs.

Can I run two panels from one controller?

Only if the model is built for it. On single-panel variants the controller drives one panel's worth of LEDs, and a second panel means a second controller and independent effects. The linked-screen variants exist precisely because splitting one controller across panels is not something you can improvise.

Colours look wrong — red shows as green

That is channel order, not a fault, and it is correctable in the app. See wrong colours and the pin sequence setting.

Something not covered here? Ask us — support questions are where these pages come from.