Under-cabinet lighting is not only a beautiful way to accent cabinets but also provides a lighting source for a room. This lighting can shine a spotlight on figurines below or a workspace or even serve as low-level night lights. The different types of lights used to mount beneath the cabinets serve different purposes, depending on the effect you want.
What are the types of under-cabinet mount lights? Which ones seem to be the best for your cabinet? Moreover, should you install them?
Why Install Under Cabinet Lighting
If you have a small kitchen, under-cabinet lighting can brighten the whole room. Dark-colored cabinets, like black or grey, can make your kitchen appear smaller.
Therefore, cabinet lighting can mitigate this. Above all, under-cabinet lighting creates more ambiance for the space. Let’s look at the different types of lighting you can install.
Puck Lighting
Puck lights are circular individual lights that create a spotlight. Sometimes, the pucks’ clean-looking design makes people want to feature these light fixtures.
A string of puck lights can be plugged in and mounted next to the lights or hidden individually in the cabinet. Puck lights mounted individually have their own batteries.
This method eliminates the worry of hiding the wiring. Almost all puck lights available use LED lights because they are too small to contain a filament or gas tubing.
Bar Lighting
Bar lights are rectangular cuboids of solid light, making them very solid light sources for your cabinet. These lights are ideal if you have a cabinet above a desk and need additional dedicated light. This bar light provides a wide illumination distribution for an entire surface below.
These lights are meant to display an entire area, in contrast to the spotlight of puck lights. They typically have a cord or wire that needs to be plugged into a power outlet or adapter. Unless it is built into the structure, the cabinet needs to be close to a power outlet to activate.
Strip Lighting
Strip lights are LED lights provided in a reel and unrolled to the desired length. They have more versatility of length than a bar light, but they appear to provide less illumination on your cabinet. Strip lights are plugged into a power source that is placed next to the lights or hidden in the cabinet.
These lights are used more as accent lighting and remote controls allow changing colors or even making the lights pulse. People treat strip lights as using spots of light as décor. While they can be bright, they are not typically strong enough to be a lighting source to light a room.
Which Light Bulb Should You Get
When it comes to light, regardless of what fixture types you use, color temperature is important in your lighting considerations. This is as important of a consideration as the types of lights you use when mounting these cabinets below. The three types of lights available in lighting are incandescent, fluorescent, and LED lights.
Incandescent Light Bulbs
Incandescent lights are the more traditional light bulbs. They tend to be warmer, with yellow or amber hues. Incandescent lights tend to get hot easily, resulting in a shorter lifespan based on how often the filament burns and warms the area.
These days, not as many incandescent light bulbs are used beneath wall cabinets. However, they are a staple in classic fortune-telling cabinets in amusement parks in the past.
Fluorescent Light Bulbs
Fluorescent light bulbs: These lights run electricity through mercury vapor in the bulbs, and the light tends to be calmer and have bluish hues. A ballast (a device that regulates the current) is why fluorescent lights tend to cost more, but they produce brighter light.
In the past, this cost more than incandescent, but the prices have come down to make it competitive. They are very bright light sources, perfect for illuminating the tops of the entire cabinet in displays.
LED (Light Emitting Diodes) Lights
LED lights have come into prominence in the last few years. Constant use of LED lights does not wear out the light diodes, and they do not get hot like incandescent. LED lights can replicate lighting by incandescence, fluorescence, or “daylight, ” similar to the illumination of sunlight.
These days, most under-cabinet lighting sources are heavily LED-based. All strip lights are LED, as are most puck lights and the majority of bar lights.
Finally, a couple of considerations outside of the lighting will affect the lighting you choose. The first is if the surface below is a light or dark surface as well as matte or glossy.
Lighter and glossy surfaces will reflect light and will affect your cabinet displays. You may want to use softer light if you want the surface below to bounce back less.
Next is to consider if anything beneath the cabinet might need electric power. Things like phone chargers, radios, or even speakers can occupy one of the power outlets. However, you must decide if under-cabinet lighting is a priority over those devices.
Final Thoughts on Under Cabinet Lighting
Overall, under-cabinet lighting helps brighten up your kitchen. With certain kitchens that have dark-colored cabinets, these lights help minimize the contrast some cabinets have.
If you have a small kitchen and want to brighten up your work area, add under-cabinet lighting. Whether you have white cabinets, dark cabinets, or stained cabinets, under-cabinet lights will add a bright charm to all kitchens.
