A recent request from a stone fabricator's client is a good illustration of a sizing mistake that's easy to make: they needed a 48-inch wide by 96-inch tall section of onyx-style stone lit evenly from behind, edge to edge, with no dark patches. The instinct is to order one acrylic light panel that matches the finished dimensions. For a panel this wide, that instinct works against you.
Why Edge-Lit Acrylic Panels Dim Toward the Middle
Our acrylic light panels aren't backlit in the literal sense — they're edge-lit. The LEDs sit around the perimeter of the panel and inject light into the edge of the acrylic, which is engineered as a light guide so that light traveling through it scatters evenly out through the face rather than staying trapped at the edges. Getting that scatter even across the whole face is the manufacturing work that makes a light panel usable in the first place, and it's something we handle in-house on every panel we build.
But there's a physical limit that finishing work can't fully erase: the farther light has to travel from the edge toward the center of a panel, the more it falls off. On a narrow panel, that falloff is negligible. On a wide one — 48 inches, in this case — the light entering from the left and right edges simply can't fully reach and reinforce each other by the time it gets to the middle. The result is a panel that's bright near the frame and visibly dimmer down the center, which is the opposite of what you want behind a stone veneer that's supposed to read as uniformly lit.
The Fix: Split the Width, Not the Height
Rather than one 48" x 96" panel, the better spec is two panels at 24" x 96" each, installed side by side to cover the same 48-inch width. Every LED on each panel now only has to illuminate a 24-inch span instead of a 48-inch one. The light stays brighter overall and reaches full evenness well before it hits the panel's own edge, so there's no dim band waiting in the middle.
This is a general rule worth applying anytime a backlit stone or acrylic application gets wide: keep individual panel widths in a range where the LEDs can carry light across the full face without losing intensity, and cover larger areas by adding panels rather than scaling one panel up. Height isn't the constraint here — a 96-inch-tall panel behaves the same as a 24-inch-tall one, because the LEDs run along the sides, not the top and bottom. It's specifically panel width that determines how even the face reads.
Mind the Gap Between the Panel and the Stone
There's a second detail that matters just as much as panel count, and it's easy to miss: every edge-lit panel has a narrow frame border around its face where the LED strip and light guide edge sit. If a stone slab or other translucent object is mounted flush against that border, the border itself casts a faint shadow line along the perimeter of the installation — visible exactly where you'd most want a clean, even edge.
The fix is a small air gap between the face of the panel and the back of the stone — 1.5 to 2 inches is enough to let the light diffuse past that border before it reaches the material. With that gap in place, you get even light across the whole surface, including the edges, with no shadow lines and no visible seam where two panels meet in the middle.
Put Together, for a Project Like This
For a 48" x 96" backlit stone application, that means: two 24" x 96" acrylic light panels side by side instead of one 48" x 96" panel, and a 1.5"–2" gap between the panels and the stone. The result is brighter, more even light across the entire face, with no dim center and no shadowing at the perimeter — versus a single wide panel, which will show both.
Specs Worth Knowing When You Quote This
Every acrylic light panel we build is custom-sized to the project, with a one-unit minimum and volume pricing available at five units or more — so specifying two 24" x 96" panels instead of one 48" x 96" panel doesn't complicate the order, it's just two line items built to the same standard. Panels are dimmable, CSA/UL certified, and backed by a 3-year warranty, with LEDs rated for 50,000+ hours and a power supply sized with 20% extra capacity included. For projects that also want dimming without running a physical switch to the fixture, a WiFi and remote dimmer add-on is available, controlled through the Tuya Smart app.
Standard lead time is 1-2 weeks, with rush production available in as little as 2 days when a project timeline is tight. Shipping is free within Canada, and duty-free to the US under CUSMA. Everything is manufactured here in Canada.
If you're specifying a backlit stone panel, a countertop, or a feature wall wider than a single panel can evenly light, it's worth sizing it as multiple narrower panels from the start rather than finding out after installation that the center reads dim. Get in touch for a custom quote and we'll help you spec the panel widths and gap for your specific stone and layout.
