Engineering

LEDs for under-cabinet illumination upgrades



Long life? Power efficient? Color temperature flexibility? Drop-in replacement? Yes please, I’ll take one of these!

I’ve long pontificated in various blog posts and teardowns about the transformative effects of LED-based lighting. LEDs improve existing illumination systems beyond what was possible with legacy incandescent (including halogen), fluorescent and other technologies, such as with vehicle headlights. They also, courtesy of their combination of inherent low power consumption and heat dissipation plus a leverage of DC voltage sources, enable new classes of products previously not possible, such as in networked “smart” lighting systems, light bulb-shaped security cameras and luminaires with embedded backup batteries.

Personally, I’ve to date mostly used them to replace incandescent bulbs of various shapes and sizes, as well as to upgrade bulb-shaped CFLs. But I recently had an idea that thankfully panned out perfectly. When my wife and I moved into our home more than a decade back, there already was an under-cabinet light source above the desk in the kitchen, AC-fed and controlled by a single-pole wall switch. Judging from its appearance, I’m guessing it’d been there since the home’s mid-1980s initial construction. It wasn’t exactly aesthetically attractive (and I’m being kind in wording it this way), although given its installation location, I mostly only saw the light it emitted, not the light itself.

So, in the spirit of “If it works, don’t touch it”, I long settled for leaving it alone. The problem was, though, that I couldn’t not touch it. Illumination came from a horizontally arranged combo of 12” and 21” fluorescent tubes, each of which regularly needed to be replaced (each time preceded by an annoying flickering pending-demise alert). Less frequently, but still more often than I’d prefer, one or both increasingly-difficult-to-source starters would fade to black, necessitating swap(s), too. And even when the fluorescent light was working normally, its humming transformers were enough to drive a sane person crazy (I’m arguably sane, anyway).

Conventional successors miss the mark

I could have just ripped it out (which, as you can already tell by the earlier photo, I eventually did) and replaced it with a conventional LED-based light “strip”, like one of these or the one above my work bench downstairs, which works great and is even metal frame touch-controllable for on/off purposes.

But in my kitchen application, it’s conversely non-ideal. First off, it requires tether to a separate “wall wart” to handle AC/DC conversion. That wall wart needs to be plugged into an outlet somewhere; unfortunately, the one at the desk is already at “full employment”. Then there’s the unsightly wire running between the wall wart and light, feeding DC power from the former to the latter. Yes, battery-operated LED strip light versions exist, too, but that’s where my “don’t touch it” aspiration comes in again. Those batteries inevitably get exhausted and need to be replaced. The whole point here is to just “set it and forget it”.

Touch leads to the other twist. Some of these conventional LED strip lights embed power switches somewhere on the plastic or metal assembly. Others, like the one downstairs, offer touch control as already mentioned. But in either case, you need to operate the successor differently than previously done with the original fluorescent unit. Remember that wall switch? It’ll still be sitting there. Won’t it get lonely if it’s no longer in use? And won’t I go slowly mad (or madder than I already am) every time I flip it, leveraging muscle memory, and then remember it’s no longer hooked up?

Form, fit, and function in the kitchen

But, after doing a bit more online research and shopping, I finally came across exactly what I was looking for. Behold NICOR Lighting’s 33” LED Direct Wire Under Cabinet Light.

When I bought mine at the beginning of July, it was nearly $53 brand new (and $43 and change in open-box condition) on Amazon. Now, as I write this, it’s only $38.70 brand-new. And so it goes. It was a tad bit shorter than its predecessor, length-wise (as well as quite a bit narrower in both width and height), but I was still able to leverage the existing mounting holes. And again, since I mostly see the light emitted, not the light itself, the dimensional variance was no biggie.

Here are some more stock photos.

You may have already noticed from them, for example, that an integrated power switch is optional; for aforementioned reasons, I didn’t buy that variant (although I could have just kept it switched on all the time, still relying solely on the wall switch). The key innovation is that the AC/DC conversion block is built in; it’s fed by the same AC wiring conduit used by its precursor. And if your wall switch is dimmable (mine’s not), it’s apparently compatible with those, too.

You may have also already noticed that it has color temperature customization control, via a five-position switch.

There are 56 two-LED clusters across its total under-cabinet span.

Moving the switch from one position to another varies which LED(s) in each cluster is/are powered, along with their relative intensity. The LED lights in my office work the same way.

All in all, I’m a happy customer (with, as always, no personal affiliation with the company, mind you). I’m left with only two things to wonder about:

Place your bets, and more generally share your thoughts, in the comments.

—Brian Dipert is the associate editor, as well as a contributing editor, at EDN.

Related Content

The post LEDs for under-cabinet illumination upgrades appeared first on EDN.



Source link