Cabinet Lighting Installation
Partnership with a cabinet lighting manufacturer makes custom cabinet light installation more efficient and precise for the lighting design and electrical contractor. Many cabinet lights, such as those made by Phantom, are pre-fabricated to specific vertical, horizontal, and radial dimensions and provide excellent sources for both storage and display cabinet lighting. Regardless of whether you are subcontracting under a builder and starting from scratch, or retrofitting an existing cabinet with new light fixtures, a low voltage cabinet light will most often meet the specific needs of your client base.
The key to successful cabinet light installation lies in shielding the source and hiding the wires. Custom linear strips are among the most low profile fixtures in the kitchen cabinet lighting and display shelf lighting industry. Much of their unobtrusiveness is attributable to proprietary engineering of the power distribution system and to smaller components that allow more light to be produced with fewer fixtures.
Low voltage lighting strips operate on a transformer that must be concealed. The actual size of the low voltage transformer you will need to install with the cabinet light depends on the total wattage of the strip. Total wattage in turn depends in part on the number of LED festoon lamps that line the strip; so longer strips for larger cabinets will need larger transformers. Even a larger strip light, however, will not require a transformer as large as most competing models use.
This is because custom-built cabinet lights install in a manner that is highly unique among linear strip lighting fixtures. Since these fixtures are custom made to order, the installer can specify exactly how they want to wire the strips to best conceal the wiring inside the cabinet. The most popular way of doing this when installing display cabinet lights is to exit the cabinet and splice the wires on the backside of the furniture. For kitchen cabinets built into the wall, there a number of other concealed wiring strategies can be implemented to effectively hide electronic components from the viewer’s line of sight.
In a highly competitive bidding situation, you can make a proposed cabinet lighting installation even more appealing by offering some additional options to your clients. For one, you can give them a choice in bulb types and explain the many benefits each type of festoon lamp brings to different scenarios. Kitchen under cabinets look best under the bright white light of incandescents. Display cabinets with fine china and rare antiques may require the installation of cabinet lights with xenon bulbs to give that extra “golden” touch to the display that xenon is famous for.
Many of your clients may be operating on a tight budget, however, and may be hesitant to invest in bulb types that could potentially increase electric bills after periods of extended use. You can easily address and accommodate these concerns by installing LED display cabinet light strips. Our patented lamp design emits approximately 50 lumens of light per lamp-five times the lumens output of competing LED lighting manufacturers. We now have five colour temperatures available as well; making LED the near equivalent of xenon in superb lighting quality and the leading contender in energy efficiency, bulb life, and UV/Infrared free lighting.
One final selling point that can add further cost-savings power to your service proposal is the installation of a dimmer switch that will control display cabinet LED lighting strips. These controls are user friendly and can turn the lights up or down like a volume control on a stereo. Any clients you have who host events on a regular basis can use these controls to both regulate power consumption and to set lighting levels appropriate to activity, occasion, and mood.
Article by Russell Neal
Phantom Lighting Inc. For more information on Cabinet Lighting Installation and Cabinet Lighting Strips please visit us.
