LED strip lighting needed for a permanent installation, hard-wired in. Multi-color preferred.

I would like to find some good, rugged and reliable LED strip lights for a very specific application in my home.

The bathroom ceiling is translucent plastic panels above a white-painted wooden grid. The original lights are 48" fluorescent tubes. I think the builder cooked it up as a modern touch when the house was built, forty years ago.

I want to restore the function, but use LED strip lights in place of the fluorescents. The advantages are that the LED's will be instant-on, will not flicker and hum, and, ideally, will give me at least two colors.

Reading the reviews on Amazon of the typical LED tape light kits, they seem flimsy, troublesome, and not quite suited to what I want to do.

At minimum I want a bright, clear white light, and lots of it. It will take several segments to produce the amount of light I need. As a bonus, if there is some way that I can also get just a dim blue light too. What I want is a 'night-light' setting where the lights can be switched on (white), off, or to 'night-light' (dim blue).

The kits on Amazon all have fancy multi-function remotes that can do that, and many more things. I don't really want to use a remote to control the lights - they will be the primary illumination so I would prefer them to be hard-wired in to the wall switch. I just can't quite figure out how to use one (or two) wall switches to get the on-off-nightlight effect I want.

The simplest way may be just to install two separate sets, one for white light, and the other for blue, and wire them to separate switches.

Anybody here have experience with them, and can speak to how well they think they would do in a permanent installation? I expect that after I install them, I will not need to service them in any way for a long time.

Posted Mar 24, 2012, 9:11 PM UTC

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