How to Properly Space Ceiling Lights, Kitchen Light Spacing Best Practices with led downlights in pakistan

Hey everybody Jeff here again and today we're going to talk to you about the importance of doing lighting in your kitchen properly like where to put the lights on the ceiling that's a common question that comes up a lot so you can see these these are some down lights that I installed here when we raised the ceiling so these are LED wafer lights actually and they're only about a half inch thick and so we don't use cans anymore we just cut holes in the drywall and we put the LED wafer bites up but a question we hear quite a bit from people is how far apart am I supposed to put the lights where do I put them how far in front of the cabinets do I put them and so we've done a lot of experimentation with that over the years and I can tell you that many builders get it wrong in fact I have never once yet walked into a kitchen any project and seen that they got the spacing of these lights correctly and by the way I just wanted to remind you if this is your first time here on the channel welcome we're glad to have you here and you might want to go ahead and hit that subscribe button down below and then hit the bell icon next to it so that you can get alerted every time.

We produce new videos we generally upload videos once a week and we have all sorts of topics covering all areas of remodeling that you're going to run into in all sorts of engineering disasters okay so I wanted to just take a minute here and show you like I came up with this plan here this drawing and it basically shows a bird's eye view if you were looking down from the unit up above as to what is going to happen on the ceiling here so if you see all of these brown things here these represent wood pieces these are the the furring strips or the strapping the the ceiling striping that we're going to put down so these are two by fours that we're going to lay flat up against the ceiling and we're going to drill them into the concrete now here's our disc lights here and I'll show you those in a minute the disc lights are what we have to use here they actually call them wafer lights they're led wafer lights and these will fit in the one and a half inch space that's up in there and we'll pre wire the their little cans there they're tiny little power supply cans we don't use the big cans anymore for recessed lighting these discs just clip into the holes that we're going to make in the drywall here and if you notice here I make my spacing three feet from every wall and this is where a lot of people drop the ball in kitchen lighting and that night we just went through this at my friend's house the electrician came in and put like for example this light here like just inches away from the front of the cabinet and when you do that it creates too much of a harsh shadow that goes down onto the counter.

You'll end up with darkness underneath your counters so the way you overcome that is you have your lights out three feet from the wall and that creates a nice wide dispersion pattern of lighting so it's very simple there's not a whole lot of rocket science to it but so many people dropped the ball on this very important point make sure your lights are at least three feet away from the wall not two feet away from the wall you don't want to be 12 inches away from your cabinet you want to be 24 inches away from the front of your cabinet here okay so you're looking at the nearly completed remodeled kitchen that we did and these are of course the cabinets that we put in and there's the granite countertops and the limestone backsplash so I wanted to point out to you about the lighting here and I'll show you on my drawing there that I made if you recall we did four lights so there's going to be two over here in two more lights over here and you'll recall that I mentioned that we always want to make your lights come out 36 inches from that wall from the back wall okay and same with over here these two lights here they start off that first light right there is 36 inches off the back wall the reason why you want it like that is so that the light can be let me swing off to the side to show you so it can be 24 inches away from the front of the cabinet that's where you want your light to be same look over here this light here is 24 inches off of that cabinet so I want you to take a look at you see how we have them here these here are actually spaced 24 inches from the cabinet that's my rule of thumb is I always try to be 24 inches in front of the cabinet and the reason why is these lights have a a big down pattern that's why they call down lights and the light spreads as it goes down right and what happens is it comes down and it hits the bottom of this candidate and it'll make a shadow on the counter but you'll notice on my counter there's no shadow there that's because I have the lights move far enough in front of the cabinets here so that when the light shines dim and it goes all the way to the back corner here and it doesn't cause me any dark shadows so we're going to show you some other kitchens in this video that we're done highly improperly where you'll have like dark shadows right here just something because they had the lights too close to the cabinets now.

Typically I see a lot of builders that put the lights 12 inches in front of the cabinets and that simply is not enough all right so if we look here at this light here this is another one where it was 24 inches in front of this cabinet here and as you can see the lighting disbursement there needs it nice and bright all the way back into that back corner so we have no shadow the only place where you're going to see a little shadow is on the corner unit here so if you look here at this corner da and follow the light down you could see only in the very back corner does it even get a little bit dark there's nothing you can do about that because you have to really be out far but in order to keep everything pretty even here evenly spaced that's the only point you're going to have a problem so our rule of thumb to keep in mind is 36 inches off the back wall which puts it 24 inches in front of the cabinet that's our rule of thumb that we always like to go by and so we keep everything symmetric we try to keep you know nice grid for lights is really all you need in a small kitchen like this if you have a bigger kitchen saying something bigger than 8 by 10 then you could probably build with 6 lights.

But I'm still not sure you would even need it you can experiment with that too and then over here in this cabinet here because this was a full depth cabinet that goes over the refrigerator this sticks out a lot further from the other cabinets so the ledge is gonna be a little close to him what happens over here isn't quite so as important as what happens over here so we stay nice and bright okay now this kitchen was an interesting kitchen because this is to have a suspended ceiling you know those ugly old grandmas ceilings from the 1970s over plastic and the fluorescent lights were behind and that's what we had here and it came too right here so you couldn't even have these tall cabinets in here they had these ugly little built-ins in here in this kitchen we raised up the ceiling here like you see it and then we added these LED dissipates here so this made this kitchen look just so much more modern and made it look bigger and we improve the lighting greatly compared to what the Builder had in here before okay so what we're going to do now is we're going to take a look at some other houses and we're going to show you just how bad the lighting was designed to these other kitchens okay let's take a look okay now here's another example of a property where you're working on here with bad lighting design so if you look here in the kitchen here you can see the shadow on the counter and the shadow is pretty much right under the cabinet here whereas if you remember a few seconds ago I showed you in the kitchen I just finished working on how I had bright light going all the way back to the corner the reason is is because here this is very typical of what we often see in these kitchens is the Builder puts his down light right here and it's basically just I don't even think that's 12 inches in front of the cabinet it's barely in front of the cabinet so what does it do it shines most of its light right there you can see the hot spot right there on the top of the cabinet and then it gets dimmer and dimmer as it goes down but it's it's such a steep line that it comes right down here like this and that's why you're left with a dark shadow on the counter so the people that design this house had absolutely no clue.

What they were doing and I want to show you over here on the other side the same thing so this cabinet here they've got a light that's right above the cabinet and again you can see the hot spot on top of the cabinet and not so much down at the bottom it's kind of dark down there and we can move some of these items here you can see there's your shadow on the counter that's just unacceptable that's bad lighting design bad planning and lastly on the last light here this one goes right over the island here not much can go wrong there because it is directly over the island but then again you know this was the style back in the early 90s in the 80s in the 70s was these these big cans that go deep into the ceiling and almost a hundred percent of the time I see electricians put these cans in wrong because when you go up into the crawlspace up above you'll see they don't adhere to the National Electric Code which says they have to put some type of a grill over the can and then protect that so that they can't put insulation directly on top of the cans so that's a that's why we nicknamed this type of lights they call them fire starters there's a lot of fires get started this way and a lot of sloppiness down here in Florida dealing with this type of lighting up in the attics when they come into like maybe put in new fixtures for you and they clear away the insulation that's supposed to lay on top of the drywall ceiling here and they don't put it back when they're done so I'm willing to bet that many of you they have lights like this if you were to go up in your ceiling above it you'll see all of your insulation is cleared out of the way and you got hot spots all along the drywall there from the heat from addict because they didn't put the insulation back that's just you know construction stupidity that we see all the time down here so let's go take a look at another property okay so before we go take a look at the other property I just wanted to take a one quick quick look here at these lights here these three lights here so all three of these violate my rule of making the light 36 inches off the back wall these lights here are maybe 18 inches to 24 inches off the back wall that's unacceptable they need to be 36 inches that extra foot makes all the difference in the world and getting the proper spread of your down light onto the counter so you don't have shadows like that okay so here's another house that's in the same street as the house we just looked at and you can see if we look from the side here how close the light is there to the top of the cabinet and if you look down you can see the shadows that it puts them in these are deep dark shadows right underneath the counter there because the light shines practically straight down and then if we look at this other one over here he's actually above the cabinet I don't know what the Builder was thinking when they did that but that light is actually above the cabinet it's not even in front of it it's over the top of it and it also leaves pretty good-sized shadow as well there and then coming back over to this last one over here you can see a good shadow right here under the under the cabinet right there on the counter and that light is pretty much equally almost directly over it when it should be probably 24 inches out in front of it that light should probably be back way over here somewhere

It would have given you a nice dispersed down light and it would have gone all the way back in the corner well lit underneath yeah we probably ought to have one here over the stove or a lot closer to it because it just seems really dark under the stove here of course the cameras gonna brighten it up a bit you might be looking at it ticking oh it looks bright but when you're standing here looking at it now the public could be some better lighting in there so you'll see here normally this would have been 24 inches in front and it is in front of this cabinet but because we went with the full depth cabinet in front of the refrigerator it's it's really only maybe a foot at the most but the importance of that is if you look at the downward cone of light here where it comes down to the cabinet and you'll notice you can see it's completely brightly lit all the way to the back wall you don't see any big harsh shadows like you do with some of the other ones like the one we just saw with all of the white cabinets you could see how poorly placed the lighting designers did that kitchen and if we come over to this other side here too you'll see the same thing on the left side of the stove because we have our light right here 24 inches in front of the cabinet when it shines down with that cone that cone comes down at an angle and it's able to light up that whole area all the way up to the back wall so the reason why you have dark shelves and I want every every one of you to go and check your shelves right now your counters there check out your counter and see do you have a dark shadow like you know like they're like the the Dark Side of the Moon you have a dark shadow right around here and if you do that's because you have a light that's too close so they're like your light is probably not going to be separated from the cabinet like minus your light is probably real close like the one I showed you earlier with that white cabinet how the light was almost in front of it and when you have that the light comes straight down like this it makes a straight down being to here so you have a dark shadow for the whole last 12 inches of your cabinet essentially and that's not right this is the way you're supposed to do it and the problem is is all of these builders they're just idiots they have people designing the lighting in your kitchen that have absolutely no idea what they're doing now the only place we're gonna see a little bit of a shadow as you can see right in the back end there of this corner cabinet and that's unavoidable at all costs no matter what you do really because the cabinet right here comes out so far it comes out if you look at it from the top there you can see it just comes out real close to the edge of the counter anyway and even though we have a set of this light here is way over here in this other light way in the back is way over here it's still not enough to overcome the angle and the distance and in the light is traveling so you can see the light is gonna come down this way and hit this edge here 

And that's how we end up with a little bit of dark back there but even then that's not like completely dark like some of the other kitchens like the one that we just showed you so this is how you do the lighting folks and it's important too because had I not especially above the kitchen in here above the sink you see what is the cabinet here if I had not put this light this far out in front we probably would have had a shadow on this backsplash here behind the sink we would have had a shadow there caused by this upper cabinet had I made the light closer like a lot of the other people do for some reason a lot of builders think that you only need to put the light 12 inches in front of the cabinet and that is just not true it's got to be 24 inches in front of the cabinet which by deduction means that you have to put your light here 36 inches off the back wall so that's all you've got to remember and I made it symmetrical in this kitchen here too so it's 36 inches off that wall 36 inches there and then 36 inches to that wall and we did this small kitchen this is a by 10 kitchen we did this with four lights you can see them right there there's all four of our lights right there and it lights up the kitchen very nicely and very evenly so this is why it is so important for you to design your lighting ahead of time think about it very very closely what do you want to do with that lighting okay and so that's why some people do the under cabinet lighting I'm not a fan of doing the wire pucks I like to use these little guys here you'll see this one here these are small LEDs that are controlled by our remote control and though they may not always be completely totally as bright as the big plug-in ones but at least it'll put some light down in there if you ever really need it but in this case here we don't really need any under counter lighting here