LEDs for plinths, kickboards and skirting-boards
LED feature lights can add subtle highlights to plinths and kickboards / skirting-boards. Though most typically used to enhance kitchen ambience, they’re also very effective in settings like bars, night clubs, hotels and domestic bathrooms.
As highlights, rather than primary working lights, your LED plinth lights should be fairly low-power. The aim is to produce subtle halo or wash effects, but not to be a distracting light-source.
(If installed in a kitchen, your working-light brightness may come from under-cabinet lighting, ceiling lights or other high-up locations.)
Kitchen plinth lights (10W RGBW LEDs)Options for installing LED plinth lights:
Before fitting plinth / skirting-board LED lights, be sure to consider the surface on which their light will fall. If you have reflective flooring (e.g., shiny tiles), you may see a dotted reflection of the LEDs on its surface. Some people don’t find this to be an attractive effect. In such cases, we recommend two options:
- If the hollow space behind the plinth/kickboard is open, then fit your LEDs in there – out of sight on the vertical surface. This arrangement means that any unwanted dotting will be out of sight too, with light from individual LEDs merging to create a smooth floor-wash effect in view.
- Alternatively, install the LED strips in our deep-surface aluminium extrusion for LEDs. This will diffuse any LED dotting, which will again produce a continuous light-bar effect in the reflection.
Find more plinth LED advice on our support page.
Where to fit your LED power supply:
Where will your LED driver be installed? If possible, a good option is to hide it away in a cupboard (or some other location away from the plinths where LED tape will be fitted). Run 2-core cable to your white/single-colour LED tape from it (as long as it’s no more the 10 metres, 1mm cable will be fine).
(Of course, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t position your LED driver in the plinth itself, if the room allows it. The only possible downside is that, if lighting multiple plinths, you will need a separate LED driver for each one.)
Don’t forget that InStyle will supply your LED strips already pre-cut to the exact length(s) that your project needs. (We’ll also solder in flexible-link cables for easy installation round corners, if required.
White LED strip lights:
If you’ve chosen white LEDs for your plinth LED lights, we recommend using 5-watt LED tape; this is ideal for highlighting.
To dim or not to dim is a matter of personal preference, but we tend to find that the majority of our customers opt for a TRIAC (mains-dimmable) LED transformer dimmed via a standard wall-dimmer unit. (Use InStyle’s own TRIAC wall dimmer/remote pack, or Aurora and Varilight both offer excellent suitable household dimmers).
For 3-colour RGB plinth / skirting-board lights, we recommend our 7.5-watt RGB LED tape.
RGB & RGBW LED strip lights (colour-change function):
For colour-change highlighting, InStyle offer two high-quality alternatives – depending on whether or not you want your strip lights to include dedicated white LED chips.
These recommendations apply to InStyle’s commercial-grade Epistar-branded LED strip lights. For lower-grade strip lights from elsewhere, adjust accordingly.