Part 1 of 2: The LED Install
Thinking of installation smart LED lighting in your home? In this blog, we walk you through how we installed smart LED lighting at a client’s 3-Room HDB flat in Jalan Besar. We hope it’ll spark some ideas for your own install.
The client appointed Illuminating Asia, working alongside the general contractor, whose electrician was still responsible for laying the wires and electrical points.
At the first meeting, the client wanted to perimeter his living room and kitchen spaces with LED strip lights.
The first thing we did was to talk the client out of the idea. If we did what the client wanted, the result would have strongly emphasized the smallness of the HDB 3 Room living areas.
LED lighting supplies are costed by length, usually by the metre. So the client’s idea would generate us maximum project value, at the expense of the client’s best interests. Impressed, the client immediately accepted the advice and appointed IASPL as the LED lighting designers for his home, and dropping his initial idea.
We sent a small team to the client’s flat to take measurements and pictures. A week later, we delivered a presentation of our lighting concepts. The final approved lighting design is below:
No LED install is challenge-free, and this is a big part of the reason why traditional electricians won’t volunteer for these jobs. Most don’t have the expertise, and for those with the capabilities, most don’t have the patience for it. Let us show you what we mean.
Installation Without A False Ceiling
The client’s brief was to install LED strip lighting without building a false ceiling. False ceilings give the surface area to create the diffused & soft lighting effect, and provide spaces to hide unsightly equipment of an LED install.
Without a false ceiling, it was going to be a challenge to recreate the cove lighting effect. The final approach was to stick the LED strip and the housing profiles onto the wiring covers themselves. (See picture above) We were sure this was done before, but since nobody within the project had seen or done this, for us it counted as an innovation.
The above looked easy enough, hiding hours of testing to find out the ideal height the covers must be from the ceiling to achieve maximum lighting effect. These are the sort of value we create for the project that oftentimes are not visible on the project quote.
The Factory Upgrade That Broke The ‘Recipe’
A smart switch (see above pic) accepts commands over wifi and sends them to lighting devices, making possible mobile app & voice commands to lighting devices. The LED lighting industry makes hundreds of such switches, along with hundreds of other lights, strips, transformers, and apps. There’s no way and no need to test them all.
At IASPL, we have ‘recipes’ that we know work well, are stable, and lasts a long time. This is intellectual property, because we got them through the distilled experiences of hundreds of projects. So for the client, we decided to use a particular recipe, where brand X of smart switch would be paired with brand Y of transformers, to be used over brand Z of LED lighting strips. We have done this before. It should be easy.
Except it wasn’t.
The China factory supplying our brand Y&Z decided to upgrade their firmware. With the new firmware, on existing components, the ‘recipe’ no longer worked.
We asked the client for more time. It took two more weeks because in effect we had to give a new fully-tested, totally stable recipe that fit the client’s requirements. In the end, we changed out everything – the controller, the switches, even some of the lights, so that we could give another stable & working solution.
Finishing The Final Installation
At the final installation, it was all about the details. For instance, we had to install the LED strip not perfectly level, because the old-style HDB flats’ ceilings were not perfectly horizontal.
The lighting profiles were carefully adjusted by hand so they give a uniform light across the wall.
Takeaways For Your Smart Lighting Install
You can buy all the required equipment online, often at cheap prices. But the expertise and experience to put it all together so it just works is where all the value is.
Plan your install the moment you decide on a reno. You may have to appoint a specialist working alongside the general contractor to make it happen. And don’t be seduced into buying the cheapest or highest-spec parts online, and expecting the installer to just use the parts your bought to just put it up. As we have shown, it doesn’t work that way.
This concludes Part 1 of the blog. In Part 2: Hey Google!, we explore how after we’ve got the lights and hardware set-up, that we set up the apps, registrations, and interfacing with Google to get everything set up.