I Have Seen the Light(ing)

By David Baron; posted July 15, 2019

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I came up with a rough draft of a design and then reached out to Brian Riecker who has a bit of expericne with this type of thing. I also became friends with Nathan Holmes, a fellow Coloradoan who lives only an hour or so away, and, who just happens to also have a bit of experience doing this type of stuff, and, who just happens to be an electrical engineer. Brian blessed my design and gave some advice concerning construction of the lighting elements. Nathan did the same and even hooked me up with the bulbs and the connecting hardware via Amazon.

The bulbs are T8 LED Tube 3' (36"), single ended direct wire 12W (30W Equivalent), 5000K light bulbs from a company called Toggled (Troy, MI). Single ended direct means no balast - they are literally direct-wired into the wall and turn immediatly on or off. Each bulb has an internal strip of LEDs. They are rated for 50,000 hours! They even came with their own mounting brackets (tomb-stones in lighting lingo).

I have two of the bulbs which cover the 15" height of the cabinet. I divided up the 'depth' of the cabinet into 5" of display, and 7" of lighting. That said, the 7" included 3/4" of 'back-plane' wood to hold the blubs and 1/8" of diffuser plexiglass. So in practice, there really is only approx. 6" of depth between the LEDs and the diffuser.

The bulbs had to be wired (on one side only) to each other, and then I had to being in power (from the wall). That power had to be directed to both the bulbs *and* a toggle switch that I decided to mount underneath the shelf. I want to give a special shout-out to Nathan, who stopped by my home and helped with the soldering needed to properly (read: safely) attach the 14 guage solid core wires to the toggle switch.

This photo is of the blub assembly, as well as the power cord coming in (the back) from the wall and being split up between the bulbs and the switch (notice the three wires going down through a small hole in the 'floor' of the cabinet)

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