Window curtains can help preserve your privacy, insulate your home, and add some elegance to pretty much any room in your home or office building, but they don’t just magically move on their own. To draw your curtains without having to touch them or manually pull them like you would with standard curtain rods, you can mount them on traverse rods. Simply put, a traverse rod is the curtain track accessory from which you suspend your curtains by hooks and draw them via pull cord.

As you can guess, there are three basic kinds of traverse rods, depending on how you want to draw your curtains. Two way traverse rods part your curtains from the middle, and one way traverse rods can draw curtains to the left or to the right. The main advantages of using traverse rods over more traditional curtain rods are control and leverage. Manually drawing your curtains can take extra effort, especially if they’re big, and dragging rings or hooks along a rod can create friction that slows down the process even more. Traverse rods provide a smooth mechanism that does a lot of the work for you.

On a very general level, traditional curtain rods make a good choice if you’re short on cash and you don’t mind a little extra cardio work when you open and close your curtains. But if you want a more advanced and automated system, traverse rods can save you some extra effort and potential frustration.