We fit motors, and we still talk most people out of motorising everything
Almost everything written about motorised curtains is written by someone selling motors, which is why it all reads the same and none of it mentions year four. We fit them, we service them, and we are regularly called to ones that have stopped working. So this is not an argument about whether motors are good — they are, on the right window.
The question is which windows earn one. In most apartments that is two or three, not all of them, and motorising the right ones rather than everything is the difference between a system you love and a set of expensive problems.
Which windows earn a motor
Windows you cannot reach. Double-height glass, a window above a stairwell, anything needing a ladder. The strongest case there is, because the alternative is not inconvenience — it is a curtain that never moves.
Very wide, very heavy spans. A long run of lined curtain is genuinely hard to pull, and hauling it daily is what wears a track out. Here a motor protects the installation as well as your arms.
Windows behind furniture. A sofa against the glass, a dining table in the bay, a bed pushed to the window wall. If you have to lean or climb to reach the leading edge, the curtain gets used badly or not at all.
Bedrooms, sometimes. Opening the curtains without getting out of bed is a real daily pleasure, and a timed opening beats an alarm. That is honest luxury rather than necessity, and it is fine to buy it as such.
The ones that do not earn it: small windows, guest rooms and studies you enter twice a week, kitchens and bathrooms, and any window you walk past ten times a day. Motorising those adds a battery to charge and a device to pair, for a convenience you were never short of.
Battery or wired, honestly
Battery motors need no cabling, fit to a finished apartment in a day, and are why retrofits are possible at all. The price is recharging, every few months depending on how often the curtain runs and how heavy it is. That sounds trivial, and for a living room it is.
Then notice the trap. The strongest reason to motorise is a window you cannot reach — and a battery motor there has to be reached, twice a year, by someone with a ladder. Battery is right for most apartment windows and wrong for the high ones, which is exactly where people put it, because it was the easy install.
Wired motors never need charging and are the more reliable long-term system. Their price is planning: they need power at the track, decided before the ceiling and walls are closed up. In a finished apartment the honest options are surface trunking painted to match, a visible cable to the nearest socket, or battery instead. If your fit-out is not done yet, this is one of the few window decisions worth making early — a window plan for your first month covers the rest of that sequencing, and the full comparison is on our motorised range.
Compatibility, which is where most of it goes wrong here
This is the single biggest cause of failed motor installations in Dubai, and it is entirely avoidable.
Apartments here run on a wide spread of systems: Apple Home, Google, Alexa, and in higher-specified buildings Control4, KNX or Lutron wired in by the developer. They are not interchangeable. A motor fluent in one may not speak the others at all, and bridging between them sometimes works and sometimes does not.
What that produces is a very expensive manual curtain: motors installed, working perfectly on their own handset, permanently outside the system running the rest of the apartment. Lights, AC and music answer one app; the curtains need a separate remote that is never in the room.
The only defence is testing it at the property before anything is quoted — not reading a compatibility list, not taking the developer's word for which system is installed, and not assuming that a brand name on a wall panel means the curtain protocol behind it is supported. Someone has to stand in the apartment, find the hub, and check it against the motor being proposed. A supplier who promises integration over the phone is promising nothing.
Noise
No motor is silent, whatever the brochure says. The good ones are a soft mechanical hum for a few seconds; the cheap ones are a grinding whirr you hear through a closed door.
In a living room the difference barely registers. In a bedroom at six in the morning it is the whole experience, and it is the most common regret we hear from people who bought on price. If a motor is going in a bedroom, insist on hearing it run on a loaded track — a motor on a showroom stand with nothing attached tells you nothing about the noise it makes dragging a lined curtain.
The track matters more than the motor
A motor is only as good as what it is dragging. It applies the same force in the same place every time, day after day, and it does not feel resistance and ease off the way a hand does.
So a track specified for hand-pulling is not automatically fit to be motorised. It has to be rated for the span and the weight, mounted so every bracket carries its share, and fixed into something that holds that repeated load — which in most Dubai towers means establishing whether the ceiling above the window is concrete or drywall first. A wave track is a particular case, since every carrier is working and the load per bracket is higher; our wave curtains page covers why a motorised wave must be specified as one from the outset rather than converted later.
Where motors fail early, the track is usually the reason. The motor is doing its job against something that was never built for it.
What actually fails, and when
Motors do not typically fail dramatically. They get slower, they start missing the closed position, and eventually they stop.
The bigger problem here is age. In the older tower communities we regularly open up systems fitted a decade or more ago and find motors out of production, paired to a remote that has been lost and cannot be replaced, or past service life with no parts available. JLT is the clearest example — much of our work there is replacing early motorised tracks rather than fitting new ones.
That is the part worth knowing before you buy: on an obsolete system, replacement usually means a new track as well as a new motor, because the old motor was matched to that track and nothing current fits it. What people expect to be a small repair is most of the installation again. The curtains usually survive, at least — panels can be re-headed onto a new track rather than remade.
Retrofitting a finished apartment
Realistically: battery motors, on a new track, with the existing curtain panels re-headed if they are in good condition. That is a one-day job per room and it is what most retrofits in Dubai actually are.
What is not realistic is adding a motor to whatever track is already up there. Sometimes it can be done, but the track has to be the right type, sound and correctly fixed, and developer-fitted tracks usually fail at least one of those. Anyone who agrees to motorise your existing track without inspecting it is guessing at your expense.
We check before we quote, because this is expensive to get wrong
A supervisor comes to you free, for about 45 minutes. On a motor job that means finding out what smart-home system the apartment actually runs and testing compatibility against it, checking whether power can reach the track, inspecting any existing track or motor honestly, and saying which windows are worth motorising and which are not. Our process is set out in how it works.
If two windows earn a motor and five do not, we will say so — the fastest way to be unhappy with motorised curtains is to put them everywhere.
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