A Beginner’s Guide to LED Strip Lights

  • 1 December

What are Strip Lights and How to install them?

 

Here’s everything about LED Strip lights – How to install Strip Lights, how to choose the right ones and Strip Light Decor ideas to glam up your home.

You must have heard how LED lighting is overtaking the dominance incandescent and CFL lights once had in lighting up your homes, and rightly so. They are energy efficient, brighter, long-lasting, cost-efficient, and versatile. 

LED lights come in compact packages and since they do not emit much heat and are shock-resistant, you can use them for aesthetic and decorative purposes on both large and small scales. One popular way is LED strip lighting. Read this guide to get a deeper understanding of the world of LED strip lights and how you can use Strip Lights to jazz up your living space. 

 

What are Strip Lights? 

An LED strip light is a flexible circuit board that is mounted with individual LED emitters, available in a variety of colours and brightness. An LED strip light is usually half an inch (10-12 mm) in width, and up to 16 feet or more in length. They can be cut to specific lengths as per your requirement, using just a pair of scissors along the cut lines, located in 1-2 inch intervals.

The backside of the strip light has a double-sided adhesive, allowing you to peel and stick the lights on different surfaces and then remove them once the purpose is served. Since the surface board is flexible, it can be mounted on surfaces that are uneven or curved without any worry of damage.

 

How to Choose the Right LED Strip Lights For Your Home?

Now that you know what strip lights are, it’s time to choose the right one for your home. Each home is different, and therefore factors such as location, aesthetics, function, and the mood you want to achieve are crucial to finding the perfect decorative LED strip lights for you. 

Take these 3 things into consideration while choosing the perfect LED strip lighting

 

  • Check the lumen output and colour temperature: 

Lumen is the measurement of brightness as perceived by the human eye and is one of the most important things to consider when purchasing LED strip lighting. Different projects require different kinds of lighting to get the desired look. 

For example, accent lighting and mood lighting require 100 to 350 lumens per foot while Industrial lighting requires 500 to 950 lumens per foot. 

Colour temperature refers to the temperature of light which is measured in Kelvin (K). It ranges from warm colours to cool white colour. Warm white lights have orange or yellow tones, and with increasing degrees of Kelvin, the light appears bluish-white. 2700K colour temperature bulbs are ideal for bedrooms and living rooms to create a cosy atmosphere. 3000K colour temperature or higher is ideal for areas that require more active tasks like the kitchen, home office, laundry room, and bathroom.

 

  • Wattage consumed per strip of LED light

Be sure to enquire what is the wattage per foot, metre, or reel before you purchase LED strip lighting. For example, some may read 30 watts on a reel and then get home and realise this is per metre or per foot, meaning the whole reel actually uses much more. Making matters worse, they have bought a power supply that covers 30 watts which is not sufficient to power the entire reel. 

 

  • Verifiable Quality

To make sure that your LED lights last their quoted lifespan or work well with minimal additional maintenance, you need to test the quality claims made by the manufacturer. For instance, thermal management and heat dissipation are crucial for the lifespan of your LED strip lights. If they are not designed properly to manage heat radiation, the LED’s 50,000+ hour lifespan may drop to 10,000 or 20,000 hours. 

 

How to install LED Strip Lights? 

If you are wondering how to install LED strip lights, it’s simple, although some basic wiring may be required depending on the type of tape you are using.

 

  1. Installing LED strip lights on a ceiling or wall

LED lights work great as creative task lighting or to highlight the architecture of a dropdown false ceiling or coving. To install LED strip lights on the wall or ceiling, you need to install them behind a lip, such as the edge of a drop-down ceiling, to hide the tape yet achieve a full lighting effect.

 

  1. Installing LED strip lights under cabinets

LED strip lighting on cabinets provides excellent task lighting. To achieve a full lighting effect, place the strip lights behind a lip, to avoid the wiring from peeping out. Make sure you measure the length and size of the strip and purchase accordingly to avoid wastage. 

 

Decorative LED Strip Lights 

LED Strip lights are mostly used for decorative purposes in households but a large number of furniture designs have also started incorporating LED Strip Lights as accent features. Crompton’s Galaxy LED light strips are the perfect choice for LED strip light decoration ideas since they add an element of excitement and fun to your room in an affordable and easy fashion. 

Crompton’s Galaxy LED Strip lights have 60 tiny LED bulbs arranged per metre to provide brighter and better light distribution. This 5-metre-long strip of lights is available in various colours like warm white, cool daylight, and blue to suit your every mood and requirement. Its super-grade adhesive offers a long-lasting fitment. That’s not all, they are completely safe to use as they have zero mercury construction and BIS Safety Standard registered surge protection of 2.5kV. 

 

They work perfectly as backlighting for furniture and for the false ceiling as well. 

 

LED Strip Light Decoration Ideas 

  1. Near the headboard: LED strip lights behind the bed’s headboard can double as night lights and give a soothing and elegant halo effect to amp up the interiors of your bedroom. 
  2. Stylish bathroom mirror: Want to feel like a diva? Attach warm white LED lights behind the bathroom mirror or vanity and your mirror selfies will have a completely fresh look.
  3. Above the study table: If you have a shelf above your study table, you can attach LED strip lights on the underside, to make studies more interesting. Cool White LED strip lights will help facilitate concentration and easy reading. Do give these LED strip light decoration ideas a try! 

 

Strip Lights in Kitchen 

At the heart of every new-age kitchen design are LED strip lights in the kitchen that combine trendiness with convenience and cost-effectiveness. 

  1. Under-cabinet LED strip lighting: LED strip lighting under custom cabinets, allows you to light up the kitchen countertops in a small kitchen. LED lighting offers a convenient yet stylish option to add task lighting to the kitchen tops. 
  2. LED lighting for kitchen shelves: Floating glass shelves with LED strip lights are perfect for displaying fine china or decorative pieces. 
  3. Connecting the kitchen space to the living space: Just use similar LED strip lights in the kitchen cabinets and for the living room shelves, entertainment unit, dining space backdrop, to create visual connectivity and a homogenous theme. 

 

Strip Lights in Bedroom 

LED strip lights for the bedroom can help create a relaxing, warm, and romantic space, which facilitates peaceful sleep and relief from fatigue. 

  1. Behind the bedside headboard: Behind the headboard is an excellent way of approaching LED strip lights for your bedroom. The refracted light gives the headboard a 3-D effect while enhancing the cozy and relaxed feel of the bedroom. 
  2. At the bed: Attaching LED strip lights to the bottom of the bed, without switching on the main lights can help promote sleep and relieve stress. It can also prevent eye irritation if you scroll your phone before sleeping. 
  3. In the ceiling: Embedding LED strip lights in the bedroom ceiling is a great way of indirectly illuminating the ceiling through reflection, hence breaking the monotonous look of a dim ceiling. 

 

Strip Lights for Gaming Setup 

When you are setting up your gaming room lights, there are endless ways to use LED strip lights as a gaming light.

  1. Under your gaming desk: The beautiful yet edgy glow provided by the LED lights placed under your gaming desk will surely boost your gaming adrenaline. LED strip lights also have a feature to change the colour, so choose the colour that best fits your mood. 
  2. Behind the monitor screen: Placing LED strip lights behind the monitor will brighten up the gaming space and act as task lighting to increase your focus and alertness. 
  3. On the wall: If you want to avoid bright overhead lamps in your gaming room, you can maintain the gamer aesthetic by attaching multicolor strip lights for gaming lights for room.  

So here you have it, a comprehensive guide on how to use LED strip lights. Purchasing LED strip lights is not a difficult task, provided you keep some prerequisites in mind such as different options for installation, power requirements, colour scheme and functionality. Acquiring the relevant knowledge and testing the quality claims of LED strip lights is key to completing your project on time.