PetrosA
Senior Member
- Location
- Lancaster, Pennsylvania
My experience with tape style LED showed me a few of it's issues:
End connectors are not always decent. I've had some problems with getting them to make contact for more than the first few minutes without fiddling with the crimped connectors.
Depending on the age of the cabinets, it can take some serious cleaning to get the tape to stick. Since there's no option for screwing it unless you get AL channel (which increases the costs) you have to make it so the tape sticks.
Color is a crap shoot at best. What looks decent on a display may look sickly and unnatural on the customer's granite, even from a name brand manufacturer. The worst LEDs I've seen had nauseous green casts to them, so it wasn't that they were too blue or too yellow, but the red/green mix was way off. I've done two jobs where the customers had LEDs (one tape, one off-brand modules for Ambiance track) supplied through a lighting designer or showroom. They were the only two jobs where I couldn't wait to get far away fast
I like the idea of LED tape, but I don't think it's going to have staying power. It's just too easy for the manufacturers to slap cheap, poorly binned diodes onto a tape and sell them. I also haven't seen a decent remote transformer option for LED tapes and I hate the idea of receptacles and SMPS in upper cabinets.
End connectors are not always decent. I've had some problems with getting them to make contact for more than the first few minutes without fiddling with the crimped connectors.
Depending on the age of the cabinets, it can take some serious cleaning to get the tape to stick. Since there's no option for screwing it unless you get AL channel (which increases the costs) you have to make it so the tape sticks.
Color is a crap shoot at best. What looks decent on a display may look sickly and unnatural on the customer's granite, even from a name brand manufacturer. The worst LEDs I've seen had nauseous green casts to them, so it wasn't that they were too blue or too yellow, but the red/green mix was way off. I've done two jobs where the customers had LEDs (one tape, one off-brand modules for Ambiance track) supplied through a lighting designer or showroom. They were the only two jobs where I couldn't wait to get far away fast
I like the idea of LED tape, but I don't think it's going to have staying power. It's just too easy for the manufacturers to slap cheap, poorly binned diodes onto a tape and sell them. I also haven't seen a decent remote transformer option for LED tapes and I hate the idea of receptacles and SMPS in upper cabinets.