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Kitchen under cabinet lighting (part II)

There are three aspects of the kitchen under cabinet lighting installation:

  1. PARTS: You need to buy the lights, power supplies, wires, connectors, brackets, and so on.
  2. CONNECTIVITY: Once you got the parts, you can connect them and make sure they work.
  3. PRESENTATION: This is completely or partially optional, but assuming you want everything to look pretty, you will need to use a few extra parts to hide wires and cover holes.

Let's check the diagram:

As you can see, the wall switch controls two outlets installed inside of the two wall cabinets: one above the sink (left), another above the microwave (top). The outlet on the left is connected to the LED light strips on both sides of the gas range (there is no need for the LED light strip above the gas range because that's where the microwave oven is and it has its own light). The outlet on the top controls three LED light strips (three strips are needed because the wall cabinet over the sink is not the same height as the cabinets on each side of it).

HOW DO THE LED STRIPS GET CONNECTED?

In the nutshell, you take a reel of LED light strips, cut the strips into pieces for each section of the cabinets (some will go under multiple cabinets), and connect each piece of the LED light strips to the powers source. You need a power supply with enough wattage to support the length of all light strips connected to it (something that needs to be calculated; for more info read in the FAQs).

There are several ways to connect the light strips to a power supply. One option would be to daisy chain the strips, but I think it would be cleaner to connect each of them to the power brick individually (for more info about these two options, read Connecting LED Strips in "Series" vs "Parallel"). That's what I did, so my power bricks are connected to the 3- and 2-way splitters, with each splitter feeding the power to the designated light strip. But how do you attach the light strips to the power splitters?

One LED strip obviously has a power cord attached to it, but the other four can use the solderless connectors. You can bypass most of the intermediaries listed here and solder everything via a single wire, but I wanted to make the installation modular in case LEDs fail and I need to replace them (and not having done this before, I first wanted to make sure everything worked), so in my implementation, each LED light strip is connected like this:

  1. LED light strip section.
  2. Strip-to-DC jack: connects to the light strip.
  3. Male connector: connects to the strip-to-DC jack.
  4. Low-voltage wire: connects to male connector, then goes through the cabinets to the power outlet (no need to solder).
  5. Female connector: connects to the low-voltage wire (no need to solder).
  6. Power splitter: connects to the female connector.
  7. Power supply: connects to the splitter and plugs into a wall outlet.

The key part here is the strip-to-DC jack which needs to match the type of LED strip you use (there are different LED light strip types and they used different connectors). You connect the ligt strip by opening the cover, sliding in the end of the strip and closing the cover (no soldering needed):

Strip-to-DC jack.

I used male and female plug adapters because I did not want to mess with the soldering iron when connecting the low voltage wire from the LED light trip to the power supply:

Male plug adapter connects to strip-to-DC jack

These adapters are a bit thick, though, so they are more challenging to hide inside of the cabinets. And alternative would be to solder the wires directly or use the pigtail adapters.

Here are the photos of how the parts are connected:

Connection to the LED light strip
Connection to the low-voltage wires
Low-voltage wires passed through the cabinet
Low-voltage wires connected to the power supply

As you may have noticed, I installed the LED light strips inside of the aluminum channels (to protect the strips and to distribute the lights more evenly). I used grommets to cover the holes at the bottom of the cabinets. And I bought cable covers to hide the wires and connectors (this is not done, yet).

PARTS

Here is the list of parts I used and how much I paid for them:

The total came to $185.84 which was under my original budget (and, I suspect, any IKEA offering). It took some hand work (drilling holes, connecting wires) and I still need to install the raceways to cover the wires (and probably cut the corners of the shelves that are on the ways of the wires). I will post another article with the photos after I am done with the inside, but so far, the outside looks and works  good.

NEXT: KITCHEN UNDER CABINET LIGHTING (PART III)

PREVIOUS: KITCHEN UNDER CABINET LIGHTING (PART I)

FIRST: INTRODUCTION

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Location: Sacramento, CA, USA

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