Wednesday, November 30, 2011

The sun comes up in Brunswick

I finally got around to seriously looking at lighting options for the lower level. I looked at numerous options and for now I settled on a flexible LED light strip. It is 16 ft long, there are 300 LED's that run off 12 vdc and is 24 watts of power. You can look at the first picture and see what Brunswick looked like before I put any lights in. It was even going to get worse once all of the scenery was installed above.
The strip comes with a sticky backing, but until I was sure of where it will go and even if I liked it I temporarily fastenened it with tie wraps. This took all of 5 minutes.

Look at the difference in Brunswick once I turned the lights on. It probably looks better in person than with a picture. The LED's are about 1/2" apart so the lighting is real even. The front to back spread of the light seems real good also. If you are a purest with the color then you'll have to figure it out.
This is the LED strip. It is not much thicker than movie film. It comes in color temps, just like fluorescent lights do. I chose "natural light", 4000K-4500K, with a yellow background. There are other options in regular light and reds, blues and greens. You can get a white background and waterproof if you want. I figured worse case I can use them as under cabinet lights in the kitchen.
I put a link at the bottom, in case anyone wants to look. These are ordered from England, but then shipped from Hong Kong.

http://www.ledlightsworld.com/smd-3528-flexible-led-strips-300-leds-p-90.html

3 comments:

  1. The LED lights look great. I might have to look into that as now I'm using cheap Christmas light strands. It doesn't have the brightness as with your photos.

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  2. Did you use just one strip under your upper deck or two running parallel?

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  3. I used just one strip along the outside edge, with the exception of one spot. Most of my upper deck is 20" or less and was narrower than the lower level below it, so it appeared to cover real good. One spot had a real dark area in the back and the upper edge was even with the lower edge so I put it closer to the middle. The staging area was 24" wide so I put a thin strip of wood (like a shim) so the lights would be angled about 30 degrees and light up more of the back area.

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