Guide to using LED lighting in your home
Have you considered a DIY project lately? Perhaps you want to redecorate your bedroom, the kitchen or extend the house. When thinking about how you can improve your home, have you considered a better way to light it? With LED lights fast becoming the number one home lighting solution, many households are switching to new ways to better light their homes. Whether you are helping to decorate your grandchildren’s bedroom or converting the loft, LEDs can play an integral part of your DIY project.
Tips for adding LEDs to your DIY projects:
1. Standard Rooms
Rooms from kitchens to bedrooms, dining rooms to living rooms, are the simplest of all to fit for new lights. Most of the time you are going to have existing wiring, junctions, switches, and fixtures to work with. Moving to downlights or spotlights is fairly simple because you can make use of ceiling recesses, wall spaces and so on. Just make sure you know exactly where all utilities are from water pipes to gas to wires and joists. Plan thoroughly and take your time.
2. Loft conversions
Lofts present an interesting challenge within a home. You have the advantage of wall spaces – usually along two rather than four sides, and underfloor space which is often filled with insulation materials. When wiring any underfloor sections, the wires need to be well insulated and all junctions covered – please consult professionals about the best way to wire these areas. Ceiling spaces may be slightly more difficult to light due to sloping roofs and a lack of places to hide wires. This means spotlights tend to be the best light fixtures though some may use downlights on an artificial ceiling at the very top of the roof, which would solve this particular problem.
When doing loft conversions, planning and safety are paramount. Good flooring needs to be added to ensure you do not accidentally fall into the rooms below because the lower floor ceiling board is not going to carry your weight.
3. Garage workshops
Many but not all garages have sockets pre-installed in the house and may also house the building’s main circuit board and fuses. Installing lights is fairly simple for garages and workshops. You need a good powerful light for the main room – we’d suggest a couple of tube lights down the middle of the space using ceiling fixtures. If it is a garage space you’re lighting, you’ll have to run the cables along the ceiling and down the wall to your mains as there’s no ceiling or wall spaces to hide them. For workshops, we’d advise you to use spotlights over specific tools or workstations so you can direct/focus light specifically on the task at hand.
If your garage is detached from the main house and is not pre-connected, you will need to use an aboveground or belowground cable to connect the two, this may, given you will be using the workshop for power tools require a new fuse, so if a tool triggers the fuse the rest of the house is isolated from any damage/overloading.
4. Lighting your shed
The key challenge for adding lighting to an outdoor shed is how you wire the lights into the mains electrics in the house. The further your shed is from the house, the more of an issue this is. Assuming the lights are not powered by an auxiliary generator, solar panels on the roof or from batteries, there’s two main ways to connect to the house using cables. One is the overhead cable which is ok for shorter distances, but does require a means of keeping it taut, weatherproof, and safe for people to walk under. The most common method is to bury the cable underground and connect to the mains within the house – usually via the kitchen or garage depending which is closer. Seek professional advice on the best way to connect the two together.
Within the shed, assuming it is prebuilt or build to order or just built to instructions, lights will require fixtures and traditional lights and spotlights tend to make for the best ones. You will need to consider the fact that unlike with building lights, you cannot hide wires in cavities and ceiling spaces. The wires will need to be pinned to the wall and run down to the main cable going to the house. This will make it harder to hide wires internally.
First appeared on LedLights.co.uk. Visit them here for more great advice on lighting your home.
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