Master Bedroom new lighting project

Hey all, wanted to share a bit about a new project that just got finished up in my house. We decided to gut our master bedroom , re-frame everything and do a tray and Vaulted ceiling. Previously we only had 1 ceiling fan light and the lights were pretty dismal. After the construction we added 7 Cree TW 6" down-lights, up-lights and kept the ceiling fan. The down-lights and up-lights are fully dimmable with Lutron Maestro switches as well.

The down-lights are standard but i wanted to share about what we did with the up-lighting. Within the Tray ceilings we installed 4" crown moulding and hid the light bars back there.

Up-lighting setup
- 24 LED Strips - Samsung LED SI-B8V111560WW
--- These are 22 inch, 3000K, 80 CRI, 24v strips
--- http://media.digikey.com/Photos/Samsung Photos/SI-B8V111560WW.JPG
- 4 Recom RACT20-350-US Drivers
--- Drivers are wired to the strips in 3 parallel, 2 series setup to bring the voltage of each to around 48V

- At full power these produce around 9000 lumen, but dim down to just around a few hundred. These alone are more than bright enough to light up the full room and the down lights and fan lights are not even necessary.


Here are some of the before and after pictures. The pictures dont give the best sense of the brightness but its pretty close. It looks quite amazing i have to say

Wow, major improvement. Really opens it up. Sanded and refinished the floors too?

If you have young kids, make sure to secure that mirror & TV. :thumbsup:

Floors are the same, just put a coat of a Bona polish on them to clean them up a bit.

Oh ya i forgot to mention the TV is doing on on the ceiling, across from the bed. We bought a TV list system from Nexus 21. You can see the black hole in the ceiling and that is where it will get mounted. Thats the last thing on the list of things to do in the room. It will full retract into the ceiling and just need to make a hinged door to cover the opening. Its a 47" Samsung TV with a Samsung soundbar as well so it sounds amazing! That is this weeks project hopefully.

1st kid is on the way in under 2 months, so we have time to secure the mirror. It weighs about 75 lbs so its not easy to move

Ah good deal & congrats on a new life full of surprises & diapers & vomit and laughter. Bona polish you say. I had to look that up. I may get some of that. I have wood floors too. Some parts need some TLC due to running dog claw & high speed cat drifting damage in a few areas.

I figured that mirror was heavy. I have one about that size. I was a bear to mount! Took 3 manly men & I had to put some heavy screws in 3 studs and used clamps and heavy awg cable. Notice I put the screws in, I was not one of the manly men! lol But just to be on the safe side with kids & kids wacko friends! lol I even had to wire my "Big Screen" TV to the wall. That was back in the day when a 42" was huge and made you the envy of the hood and had it 4 wheels!

I too had a vaulted ceiling in my old house. I added a 1/2 inch black/grayish pin strip on the crown molding. It looked real slick. It visually breaks it up. You can try it with electrical tape to get a idea. Thats what I did. lol Then took that down, masked it & painted it. I used a semi gloss oil based paint.

Those pictures look really nice. I like the way the two different types of lighting combine together.

One thing, if I can bring up though, and it might just all be my personal preference. LED light looks fine if there's natural daylight coming through the window, but at night time, when it's all LED, the lighting just seems to be a little "glittering" on my eyes, not in a good way. If I was building a new room, I would probably use LED fixtures as background or accessory lighting, not the main lighting. It is my belief that when you combine more than one different type of lighting in a room, the light is complementary. Each has it's own unique spectral profile, not the same wavelengths, and together they help average out to give better lighting in the room. It's one thing to have different types of light distribution and different color temperatures, but we can take that one step further and have different types of spectrums too. The light really "feels" different. So I think the ideal, if one is using more than one type of light source in a room, is to use two different types of light sources, so for example, not both fluorescent, not both LED.

Just one example, I have one room where I experimented combining a Cree TrueWhite LED fixture with Vu1's ESL bulbs (an unusual technology that uses cathode ray vacuum tubes for lighting, designed to replace CFL downlighting). Each type of lighting, by itself, looks good and bad, but each looks good and bad in different ways, and the light really seems to combine together in a more interesting way.

Pictures, unfortunately, do not really capture the way the lighting actually "feels". It shows color temperature and light distribution, but it's another thing when you are actually in the room. In other words, lighting is more than just about how things "look", I think.

Sorry, I realize this is a little complicated, just wanted to throw my thoughts and opinion in there. There might not be anything to what I am saying here, just something for lighting enthusiasts to possibly consider.

I am very interested about the technology of LED, and have bought all sorts of LED fixtures myself just to play around with cool gadgets and write online reviews, but the reality is when it comes to actual lighting in my home, I am just not that big of a fan of LED, I prefer my incandescent bulbs, it's just more comfortable lighting, easier on my eyes. Of course some people like higher color temperatures, more interesting, a whiter color of light in some rooms, and then incandescent is really not an option then.

But yeah, again, your pictures look really good. There is really not any issues with color temperature or light distribution I can see, looks like they did a good job. Those strip lights almost look more like 4000K in the picture, or at least a little higher than the downlight fixtures. Are you sure they are 3000K ?

Are the lights on separate switches? Might have been a good idea to have those strip lights on a dimmer switch, so you can turn the central lighting down when you want, give a more relaxing feel.

Anders Hoveland said:

Those pictures look really nice. I like the way the two different types of lighting combine together.

One thing, if I can bring up though, and it might just all be my personal preference. LED light looks fine if there's natural daylight coming through the window, but at night time, when it's all LED, the lighting just seems to be a little "glittering" on my eyes, not in a good way..

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... and meanwhile, back here at the outhouse, things are piling up here ....



OH, and awesome lighting job MDS82. Us "REAL" lighting enthusiasts (and professionals) are impressed

mds82 said:

It will full retract into the ceiling and just need to make a hinged door to cover the opening. Its a 47" Samsung TV with a Samsung soundbar as well so it sounds amazing!

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Please post pictures of this plus a vid if possible. Sounds cool! Great job with the lighting and the remodel as well.

TV should be mounted in the next week or so, i'll get a video then

Good choice on samsung boards! Awesome indirect style lighting. Did you have the fixtures custom made, or are the boards mounted on a channel? Also, have you tried using optics or diffuser lenses to smooth out the harshness of the dots?

dc38 said:

Good choice on samsung boards! Awesome indirect style lighting. Did you have the fixtures custom made, or are the boards mounted on a channel? Also, have you tried using optics or diffuser lenses to smooth out the harshness of the dots?

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the Samsung sound bar is great so far, very happy with it. A bit disappointed the sub woofer is about 1" too tall and it wont fit under the bed as planned though
For the LED light strips, i just attached them to a piece of wood cut at a 45 degree angle, pointed towards the center of the room. There are actually no hot spots at all since the LED's are placed less than 1/2 inch apart from each other.

Her is a quick diagram of how its in place

I had to turn my 10" sub on its side with the woofer firing downward. I put some small feet on it to raise it up about a inch. It has a very nice sound.

mds82 said:

A bit disappointed the sub woofer is about 1" too tall and it wont fit under the bed as planned though

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I would just make some wooden spacers stained the same color as your bed to raise it that extra inch or so, so the sub fits under the bed....

Well i think it was more like 2 or even 3 inches actually. It almost fit in between the slats in the box spring, but i'm not changing the structure of that.

What current are you driving the boards at? Did you install the drivers in a remote box? Just concerned for your safety...those boards can get rather steamy when insulated...I work with pretty much the same kind of things at work lol

the driver puts out a max of 350mA and that's divided across 3 strings, so a max of 116 mA per board. They are rated for up to 400mA so they are well within range for the heat of those. The drivers are in free air just resting against the crown molding so they will be save enough there. Thanks for that concern there

How many Samsung bars and which driver / PSU did you use?
I plan to do some indirect lighting that would require 10 metres of LED strip / bar

I am thinking of this PSU
http://www.gearbest.com/diy-parts-and-tools/pp_119293.html
and these bars: 0.5m 8520 36 SMD Rigid LED strip Bar
http://www.ebay.com/itm/10pcs-0-5m-8520-36-SMD-Rigid-LED-strip-Bar-light…
from seller tinglai2011
These 12 volts 8520 LED bars must be very new, no review yet when I googled. They appear to be the brightest LED bar now at 18 watts per metre
I intend to connect one terminal to the PSU output then run a cable all the way (10 metres) to the other end to connect to the other terminal. The point is to eliminate voltage drop at the end of the strip. Since it is 15 amps plus, what kind of cable gauge should I use?
Another question: anyone has done a USB LED behind TV for mood backlingting? As my TV is large 75 inches, I need at least 5 metres long strip.
This one on DX says 500 lumens but I think not possible as it is just powered by USB. What do you think the lumen output would be?
http://www.dx.com/p/usb-powered-6w-...03-silver-black-dc-5v-10m-374144#.VW5xjJ2Ud8E

NickBose said:

and these bars: 0.5m 8520 36 SMD Rigid LED strip Bar
http://www.ebay.com/itm/10pcs-0-5m-8520-36-SMD-Rigid-LED-strip-Bar-light…
from seller tinglai2011
These 12 volts 8520 LED bars must be very new, no review yet when I googled. They appear to be the brightest LED bar now at 18 watts per metre

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So many problems here: First is that you are buying no-brand/generic light bars from China, with no documentation or spec sheet, at a much lower cost than anything from a store, and you aren't concerned that there are no reviews? Second, light output is typically specified in lumens. Watts is just the power consumption. And 18W/foot (not sure where you got that number from) is going to make these insanely hot. Assuming their provided numbers are correct, the brightness will be ~2000lm/meter, which also seems unrealistically high for a quality light bar.

The fact their color temperature is >6000k and they don't mention color quality at all tells me these are most likely bargain basement junk LEDs. Will they be bright? Probably. But they will look terrible, and I wouldn't expect these to last more than a few weeks.

If you want good lights, you're going to have to spend good money. At least 3x more than this for anything of reasonable quality. And you should never ever buy generic LED products from ebay unless you don't care that they are junk. You can take that advice and do with it what you may.

Edit: Reading through this again, I kind of come off sounding like a jerk. It was not intentional, I was just in a rush.

CoveAxe said:

The fact their color temperature is >6000k and they don't mention color quality at all tells me these are most likely bargain basement junk LEDs. Will they be bright? Probably. But they will look terrible, and I wouldn't expect these to last more than a few weeks.

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Actually most Chinese LEDs are about 80 CRI, the same as standard LEDs. I have bought several low cost Chinese emitters and none of them have burned out yet, at least not in a situation that wasn't my fault.

For residential use, though, it would have been better to get a strip with 90-93 CRI.

And obviously 6000K is far too cool white than anything you would want in your home. 4500K is the coolest I would want to go, even 5000K is pushing it.
Sorry, I have my monitor set to a lower color temperature because it's easier on my eyes, so it is hard for me to try to discern the actual color temperature of light sources shown in images.

But we don't know that. It's not published anywhere, and there's no brand name or part number for cross referencing. It's literally a gamble. Maybe they're good, or maybe (most likely, I suspect) they're junk.

For a labor intensive project like this, I just don't understand why someone wouldn't spend a little bit more money and get something branded that you look up all the specs ahead of time, and be reasonably certain that it will work as expected the first time (or return/exchange it if not) rather than just going off some incomplete pie in the sky specs that don't even have a review for them.

CoveAxe said:

For a labor intensive project like this, I just don't understand why someone wouldn't spend a little bit more money and get something branded that you look up all the specs ahead of time, and be reasonably certain that it will work as expected the first time (or return/exchange it if not) rather than just going off some incomplete pie in the sky specs that don't even have a review for them.

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Because maybe the extra 50% or 75% more money just to know some more information is not worth it?