"Electric curtains" is what most people actually call them.
Not motorised curtains, not curtain automation, not any of the terms we use in the trade. Someone sees a curtain open by itself at a relative's house or in a hotel room, and the phrase they arrive with is electric curtains — or the Urdu equivalent, bijli wale parde.
So this guide is written using that term, and it answers the questions people actually ask us on WhatsApp before they buy: what is this exactly, what does it really cost, what does it do to my bill, and what happens when the electricity goes.
What electric curtains actually are
An electric curtain is an ordinary curtain on a motorised track.
That is genuinely the whole idea. The fabric is normal curtain fabric — same cloth, same stitching, same tailor. What changes is what sits behind it: an aluminium track with runners, and a motor at one end that pulls the curtain along that track.
Electric curtains are ordinary fabric curtains running on a motorised track, so they open and close by remote, wall switch, phone app or voice instead of by hand. The fabric is normal curtain fabric — what changes is the track behind it and the motor at one end.
People often assume electric curtains are a special kind of curtain you have to buy as a set. They are not. In most homes the visible curtain looks exactly like the one that would have been there anyway.
The three parts
The track. An aluminium rail, cut to your window. This is the part that does the mechanical work, and it is also the part people underestimate — a cheap track with plastic sliders will drag and rattle no matter how good the motor is.
The motor. A drive head at one end of the track, plugged into a normal 220–240V point. It pulls a belt that moves the curtain carriers along the rail.
The control. A handheld remote, a wall switch, a phone app, or your voice through Alexa or Google Home — depending on which motor you choose.
The three questions everyone asks
Nobody's first question is about torque ratings. These three come up on almost every enquiry.
1. What happens when the power goes?
This is the first thing people ask in Pakistan, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sales one.
Not while the power is off, because the motor needs electricity to run. But you can still pull the curtain by hand without damaging anything, and the motor remembers its open and close positions through the outage — so when the power returns it picks up exactly where it was, with no resetting.
Two details make that work, and both are worth checking on any motor you are quoted:
Manual override. A proper curtain motor is designed to be hand-drawn. You pull the curtain and the gearbox lets it move. A motor without this feature will fight you, and forcing it is how gears get stripped. Every motor we supply is hand-draw safe.
Limit memory that survives a power cut. The motor learns where "fully open" and "fully closed" are. On the motors we import those positions are held in capacitor-backed memory, so a power cut does not wipe them. This matters more here than in most markets — if the limits reset every time the electricity goes, you would be recalibrating your curtains several times a week.
2. Will it raise my electricity bill?
By a negligible amount. A curtain motor only draws power in the few seconds it is actually moving, not while it sits still. Even opening and closing several curtains twice a day adds up to a small fraction of one unit of electricity per month.
The reason is simply how little the motor runs. Rated power on these motors sits between roughly 18W and 75W depending on the model — but that figure only applies during the few seconds the curtain is in motion. A curtain takes a handful of seconds to cross a normal window, twice a day. Multiply that out over a month and you are still well under a single unit of electricity.
For context, that is less than what a ceiling fan uses in an afternoon.
3. Are they noisy?
Less than people expect. The motors we carry are rated below 35dB, which in practice is a low hum you notice for a few seconds and then stop hearing.
The noise complaints we do get almost always trace back to the track, not the motor — plastic sliders in a cheap rail, or a track mounted without enough brackets so it flexes as the curtain moves. This is why we do not sell motors separately from a proper track and ball-bearing runners.
What electric curtains cost in Pakistan
Pricing in this market is often quoted vaguely, so here is ours in full.
At BAJT the motor is priced by track length: PKR 28,000 for 5 feet, 30,000 for 10 feet, 32,000 for 15 feet and 34,000 for 20 feet. Professional installation is a flat PKR 3,000 anywhere in Pakistan, so a 10-foot window comes to PKR 33,000 all in.
Written out in full, motor plus installation:
- 5-foot track — PKR 28,000 + 3,000 = PKR 31,000
- 10-foot track — PKR 30,000 + 3,000 = PKR 33,000
- 15-foot track — PKR 32,000 + 3,000 = PKR 35,000
- 20-foot track — PKR 34,000 + 3,000 = PKR 37,000
Two things worth understanding about that list.
The price follows the track, not the motor model. A heavy-duty motor on a 10-foot window costs the same as an entry-level one on a 10-foot window. You are not penalised for needing more capacity.
There is nothing after the total. No delivery charge, no visit charge, no "extra" for a difficult ceiling. The full breakdown is on our pricing page.
We import directly rather than buying through a local distributor, which is where the pricing comes from. There is no reseller margin sitting on top.
Choosing between the motors
We stock three, and the honest summary is that most homes need the first one.
Tuya GE82TY — rated for 50kg of curtain, WiFi plus a handheld remote, works with Alexa and Google Home. This covers the overwhelming majority of bedrooms, lounges and dining rooms.
Dooya DT52E — the 100kg motor. This is for heavy blackout drapes, theatre-style curtains, and very wide spans where the fabric weight genuinely justifies it.
Dooya DT72TV — professional-grade, used where curtains are part of a larger building system: hotels, ballrooms, villas with a central control setup.
If you are unsure, the deciding factor is almost always fabric weight and track width, not features. Send us the window measurement and what fabric you are planning and we will tell you which one you need — including if that is the cheapest one. A full comparison sits on our curtain motors page.
What to sort out before you buy
This is where most of the avoidable problems happen, and all three are decisions made before your curtains are stitched:
- Make the track at least one foot wider than the window on each side. The fabric needs somewhere to stack when it is open, and the motor head physically occupies part of the track.
- Leave the electric point at one end of the track, not in the middle of the window. The motor needs live and neutral at one end. Moving this later means breaking finished plaster.
- If you are doing a false ceiling, leave at least 10 inches of open space between the wall and the ceiling edge, so the track and motor head sit hidden.
Each of these is explained properly, with the reasoning, in our curtain motor installation guide. If your curtains are not stitched yet, read that one next — it is the single most useful thing on this site for anyone still at the planning stage.
Can you convert curtains you already have?
Often, yes — with one qualification.
Usually yes for the fabric, but the track itself gets replaced — the motor and the track are one system. Whether your existing curtain transfers cleanly depends on how it was stitched and what heading style it uses, so the quickest answer is to send us a photo of the curtain and the top of the window on WhatsApp.
We answer that question several times a week and it takes about a minute from a photo. There is no charge and no obligation.
Is it worth it?
Being honest about who this is not for: if you have one small window in one room and you walk past it twenty times a day, electric curtains are a luxury rather than a solution.
Where they genuinely earn their cost is the situations people do not think about until they live with them. A wall of glass in a lounge that takes real effort to draw. A bedroom where the curtain is behind the bed and you have to climb across to reach it. Tall windows in a double-height space that need a ladder. Blackout curtains in a child's room on a schedule. An elderly parent who should not be stretching for a curtain rod.
That is where a curtain that opens on a button stops feeling like a gadget.
If you are weighing it up for a specific room, message us the window size and what the room is used for. We will give you a real number and tell you honestly if we think it is worth doing.