LEDs for covings and cornices
Decorative covings and cornices at the top of your walls are a great location for LED strip lights.
For small rooms, high-power coving LEDs can provide all the lighting required. For larger rooms, coving LEDs make for excellent feature lights / highlights.
5-watt white LED tapes give a room an ideal feature-lighting effect. These low- level highlights typically don’t need to be dimmable.
For high-brightness feature lights, choose 10-watt white LED tapes. (Because they’re more powerful than 5W highlights, we recommend making them dimmable – to achieve this, use either a TRIAC LED driver or wireless dimming receiver).
12-watt white LED tapes and upwards are bright enough to provide full working light for covings in small / medium-sized rooms. For larger rooms (say 5m x 5m plus), you may want to add a couple of spotlights too.
For most 12W installations, we advise the LEDs should be dimmable.
Brighter & stronger
20-watt white LED tapes offer brighter, stronger coving work lights than 12W LEDs. In most cases, they should be dimmable.
Only suitable for coving and cornices in large rooms, 24-watt white LED tapes provide super-bright work lighting, comparable to fluorescent tubes. You’ll definitely want these lights to be dimmable!
Looking for the cheapest colour-change LED lighting option? 7.5-watt RGB LED tapes are great for colours, and can also produce a good pure white. Use them for feature lighting only.
Dining-room coving with 7.5W RGB LED tape10-watt RGBW LED tapes can be used for feature lighting too, with a palette of great white-tint mixes. They are bright enough for use as work lights in some locations (when all four colours, including the dedicated white LEDs, are set to full power).
If your 10W RGBW strips intended gas work lights, then consider adding a spotlight or two as well.
For high-brightness feature lighting in larger rooms (say 5m x 5m), 15-watt RGB LED tapes are a good choice.
They can provide strong ambient-colour lighting, and they’re powerful enough to create extreme wall-washes, rather than the halo effect produced by lower-level feature lights.
If you have the budget and dimmable functionality, 15W RGB tapes are a great all-round for colour-change lighting.
Our brightest colour-change strip lights, 20-watt RGBW LED tapes can be used as effective working lights (depending on the location, you may want to add an odd spotlight). Or, when used for feature lighting, they offer a great range of white-light mixes too.
20W RGBW LEDs bring this kitchen to lifeThe most popular RGBW strip is our RGBWW version, with its dedicated warm-white LED chip – that’s because it can produce not only a perfect warm-white, but also pure-white too (from an equal mix of red/green/blue light).
These recommendations apply to InStyle’s commercial-grade Epistar-branded LED strip lights. For lower-grade strip lights from elsewhere, adjust accordingly.
