So I finally go around to installing the custom DIY light strip that I created in a previous video. These smart light strips are ZigBee based, meaning that I can control them through my Philips Hue app.
I created my own light strips because I have a dishwasher in the way, breaking the run of light strips – so it was easier to have two cut-down light strips all joining back to a central ZigBee controller from GLEDOPTO.
Video Transcript
Hey YouTube, I’m Tristan from Smart Home Point. Do you like my scarf? I knitted it myself. I’m joking. This is the Smart LED light strip that I’ve shown in another video, that I created myself. The reason I created it myself is, I’m gonna be installing this in my kitchen, which I’m gonna show in this video, but I’ve actually got a dishwasher in the way, in the middle of my run, and I didn’t want to go out and buy loads of different LED lights strips, and loads of connectors to actually join things together. So I thought it’d be a lot easier to create my own Zigbee light strip.
And as I mentioned, I’ve got a previous video on this which you can check out. In today’s video, I wanted to show off this light strip more, show how I’m gonna install it in my kitchen, and also discuss whether it’s more useful to actually run LED light strips as they are, which has the backing tape on them, and install them directly, or whether to run them in a diffuser channel. Now a diffuser channel is quite useful because it actually spreads out, or diffuses, the light. And as a result, you don’t get these individual light bumps, or hotspot, type effect. It helps diffuse it. It basically helps spread that out. It also helps cool the LED channel as well because basically, the diffuser acts as a heatsink. So I wanted to show this all off in this video, let’s take a look.
Okay, so the first thing I done was actually measure up and then cut my diffusers. And basically, to install these, you wanna have this bracket, you can see there, you need to actually screw this into the bottom of your kitchen cabinets, in my case, which basically involves planking on the floor and using a really small screwdriver. Wouldn’t recommend. No, it’s really annoying to do. And also, if you’ve got any corners, you need to make sure that you actually cut them accordingly so that you can actually run the LED light strip around that corner, which is like this. It’s a bit sloppy, doesn’t look that good, but it does the job.
Title of your sex tape. Okay, now here I actually have run all my LED light strip, you can see it’s behind my dishwasher that I’ve had to pull out, and I’m powering it just from a power strip on that. And before I push my dishwasher back in, I wanna make sure everything works. And so what I’ll do is just turn on the switch. (LED’s beep) And you can see there, the LED light strips light up, which is great. So I keep them on while pushing the dishwasher back just to make sure that’s you know, there’s no loose connection or anything like that. There we are. So you can see now that I’ve actually pushed the dishwasher back, and crucially I’ve got slack on my LED light strips so I can run them into the diffuser channel with no issue whatsoever
So actually having slack and making sure you’ve got slack is really important here. Okay, so in terms of actually running them into the aluminum channel, take off the backing tape, it makes it a bit easier, and then literally just position. As you can see here, I’m just literally positioning the LED light strip all the way along, and that’s there, make sure it’s got a nice stick. Make sure it’s stuck down nice, that is. Okay, brilliant. And once that’s all stuck down and you’re happy with it, you can actually put the erm, you can actually put the cover on it, and this diffuses the light. You can almost see the light changing now. Not at the moment because I’m messing around with something. There we are, let’s carry on. Right, and that diffuses the light a lot better now that that cover’s actually on it. Okay, there we are. And please ignore the dust, sorry about that.
Brilliant, so that’s all done. So if I just show you that now, you can actually see it in the strip there, you can actually see the dotted effect, the hotspots, but they are a lot better with the diffuser channel than if you didn’t run that at all. So that’s the finished effect there. Right, in terms of the actual hotspot effect, the left hand side actually has the covers on them, the diffuser covers, the right hand side does not. And you can see the dotted effect a lot more prominent here. So I just wanted to show this off because it’s quite important to show. So you can see all those individual hotspots compared to on the left-hand side where you just don’t have that. So the overall effect is a lot nicer with a diffuser channel and obviously with the cover on. (drum roll) And that’s the final effect, there you are. So I’m quite happy with how it’s turned out.
As you can see, it’s a really nice effect. A diffuse channel, there’s no cables anywhere, it’s a custom run, it’s all controllable via Zigbee, via my Philips Hue app, or an Amazon Echo device, really easily. And as you can see, it changes color, it dims down, it can be turned off, and it can be turned back on.
So I’m really happy with how this has turned out, it’s completely custom installed, and it looks really nice, in my opinion. If you liked this video, please click the thumbs up button and don’t forget to subscribe. Thank you.
Thank you for doing this I found your very first article on smart kitchen lighting and came searching for this because I wanted to see the updated pics of what you did with your kitchen. I especially like how you showed the difference with the diffuser.
Thanks, yes it worked out quite nicely in the end! I have a Hue Lightstrip in my study which isn’t in a diffuser channel and you do notice the difference – I prefer them in a diffuser channel. I wanted to add a lot more smart lighting, but will probably do this as a future project instead.