Good day all,
We are working on a kitchen remodel and will be installing over and under cabinet lighting. I have a smartthings ecosystem with several lights set up so far and they all work great!
It gets complicated when you factor in that there will be a total of 10 plugs working from one switch (is this possible to control and dim all the lights simultaneously?)
Additionally two of the plugs will have sonos speakers plugged into them that need to always be on.
I guess we would need more details of your kitchen cabinet layout and requirements to offer any detail.
We have a galley style kitchen with a 3m oak shelf on one side and 3.5m of cabinet, cooker, cabinet on the other side.
We have 3m of Ikea Mittled LED (28w total) under the oak shelf driven by a 30w Ikea Tradfri driver.
We have about 2.7m of generic 24v LED tape (about 28w too) under the cabinets driven by another 30w Ikea Tradfri driver.
The key is to decide if you want accent (low wattage) or task lighting (higher wattage) and do not overload the drivers.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for the quick response! I have a galley style kitchen as well. The contractor has wired above and below the cabinets for outlets.
There are three sections of cabinets, one long and two shorter cabinets.
Sounds like I would need 6 tradfri drivers 1 each for the top/ bottom of each section if I understand the driver properly.
Does that sound right?
The Ikea Tradfri drivers can control multiple individual LEDs so it may be possible to have a lower number of drivers if they can be connected without exposed wiring. Each Tradfri driver is individually controllable, so a single driver could power above and below an individual cabinet if you are happy for above and below to be synchronised.
The most important thing to decide is what wattage you require. Mine are approx 10w per meter and I run them at 75% most of the time or 100% if I am doing something detailed on the work surface.
On the cabinet top, do you want ‘accent’ lighting or are you uplighting the ceiling to light the room? The latter would require much more wattage (not sure how much; I dont have uplighting).
Ikea Tradfri LED drivers are available in 10w and 30w models and require 24v LEDs. If you attach too much wattage to a driver, it will shut down.
Ikea Tradfri works with SmartThings/Aeotech hub; I have LOTS or Ikea Tradfri lighting on my SmartThings V2 hub.
There may be alternatives to Tradfri LED drivers, I have not looked beyond them.
LED strips are quite reasonable. You might want to buy a 5m roll and experiment with it. For Tradfri LED drivers it needs to be 24v. Pick the colour temperature you need (mine is warm white) and the watts/meter. Wire a cabinet lenght of LED to a suitable Tradfri LED driver and use that to calculate what you need. The drivers have an unusual plug; you will need a vagdal cable and cut/join one end to the LED strip.
Because the LEDs under our oak shelf would be visible we chose Ikea Mittled aluminium channel lights (discontinued). With the cabinets the LEDs would not be exposed, so we went with COB style LED tape. Both have similar colour and brightness.
That is just what I would do; for what its worth.
