Power is where LED wall planning goes wrong quietly. Get it wrong and nothing looks broken until the wall flashes white on a test pattern and a breaker opens mid-show. This is the arithmetic, and the convention working crews actually use.
Every panel data sheet quotes two power figures: maximum draw (full white at full brightness) and typical or average draw (roughly a third of maximum, depending on content). They answer different questions, and mixing them up is the classic mistake.
Circuits and distribution are sized on maximum. Content is unpredictable — one white flash frame, one test pattern during focus, one card that fails to a white screen — and the electrical distribution has to survive all of it without opening a breaker. Typical draw is for a different conversation: what to tell the venue, or what generator to order, where nobody provisions for sustained full white.
Never load a circuit to its nameplate rating. The working convention across live production is to load to 80% of the breaker rating, which leaves headroom for inrush, voltage sag on long runs, and the reality that no two panels draw identically.
That gives usable capacity per circuit:
Divide usable circuit capacity by the panel maximum draw and round down. A 180 W panel on a 16 A European circuit gives ⌊2,944 ÷ 180⌋ = 16 panels per circuit.
Cabinet power interconnects are directional: in on one side, out on the other, gendered plugs, and jumpers as short as the manufacturer can make them. Seen from the rear that means a horizontal run only goes left-to-right — you can never snake a run back. Vertical travel works both ways, so a run can snake up and down across adjacent columns — down one, a hop right, up the next — for as many columns as the circuit can feed. What it can never do is snake left and right: a horizontal return leg would run right-to-left against the connectors. The other legal shape is a single row fed left-to-right. A good plan uses whichever needs fewest circuits: a wall 12 columns wide and 6 rows high, where 18 panels fit on a circuit, needs 12 circuits as single vertical strings but only 4 as three-column vertical snakes.
From there, distribution follows: group circuits onto three-phase distros (roughly 18 circuits per 63 A distro), and count panel-to-panel jumpers as the panel count minus the number of strings, plus about 10% spare because jumpers go missing.
Take 72 panels of a 2.8 mm tile drawing 180 W maximum and about 60 W typical, on European power. Maximum draw is 72 × 180 = 12.96 kW; typical is around 4.3 kW. At 16 panels per circuit, the 12×6 wall runs as 4 vertical snakes of three columns each — down, hop right, up, hop right, down — 4 circuits at 98% each on a single 63 A three-phase distro, a third of the feeder cable of single vertical strings.
The number you give the venue is not 13 kW. It is the maximum for the distro and breaker sizing, and roughly 4.3 kW as the realistic sustained load — with the honest caveat that the wall can hit maximum at any moment.
RigPlan does this arithmetic for you. Enter the wall once and it derives panels and spares, rigging from your own stock, circuits, the data wiring plan and the full pack list — free, no sign-up.
Open the calculatorSize circuits, breakers and distribution on maximum (full white) draw at an 80% derate. Use typical or average draw only for generator sizing and energy cost estimates, never for circuit counts.
Divide 2,944 W (230 V × 16 A × 80% derate) by the panel maximum draw. A 180 W panel gives 16 panels per circuit; a 250 W panel gives 11.
It leaves headroom for inrush current, voltage drop across long feeder runs, and panel-to-panel variation. Loading a breaker to its nameplate rating invites nuisance trips at exactly the wrong moment.