Puck Lights

[VoltzElectric]

Looking for some help!

I have a bar that I'm wiring, and they have these small lockers for members to put their personal booze in ( 18H x 8w x 6D). The owner wants lighting in every locker, 72 lockers and have them dimmable. He is looking at puck lights, but everything I look at has:
1. short leads ( i can rewire them all)
2. 3 per transformer........(25 trans. seems kinda excessive)(some I can do 6 on)
3. With that many lights, would seem that it would produce a lot of heat.

What im looking for is......Is there a puck light system out there that I can buy that would have maybe 3 or 4 transformes, that I could hook all these up to. Also......(lol) of course cost is an issue, cheap is best. I have tried a few vendors with little success. Anyone have a suggestion?:grin:

 

[jb_04]

What is the wattage on the pucks? Ive used a 250w transformer for 12 20watters.

 

[LarryFine]

The quantity suggests LED's to me.

 

[quogueelectric]

I vote for leds I hate the heat from the quartz pucks.

 

[mcclary's electrical]

I've had customers complain that a quartz puck under a cabinet was melting the chocolate in the cabinet. If you put a bunch of those in close quarters, you won't have a locker, you'll have an oven.

 

[active1]

IMO some of those puck lights will give you constant failure if on all day. Such as the ones with the 20w G-4 bi-pin bulbs. They have an average life advertised of 2000 hours. If they make it that long and are on you will be changing them every 6-9 month (on 8-12 hrs a day). The bulbs cost between $5-10 each. 72 x $5 = $360. To change the bulbs out can be difficult because of their small size, fragile pins, and many times the puck is in a difficault place to work in, and sometimes you can't see your work with your arm in the way. If it takes a person an average of 6 minuits replace a bulb they will be their almost all day.

Then you have the problem of the puck sockets going bad. The bulb will be out. Put a new one in sometimes it works a few times then it will go out again the next day or two. That does not make for a happy customer after they paid a person to work all day changing them.

Finely if you use those cheep electronic transformers they will fail and on their way out give you an intermitant condition of working. Making it hard to fix "we got a few bulbs that don't work sometimes but don't remember which ones".

LED is the way to go. For incandescent lighting I like the Juno Trac 12. The wedge bulbs are much easier to change, you can change location and number of bulbs anytime, it can use bulbs as small as 3w, type of bulbs are said to last 20,000 hours. The sockets don't get so hot so they don't have problems. The bulbs can be found for maybe $1.

Alico does make some incandesent halogen that are a bit better. They use a wedge base 18w bulb that is said to last 10,000 hours. The bulb is maybe $1-4. It operates much cooler than the halogen so the socket does not have issues. Agan it has a wedge base that is easy to change the bulb.

Myself I always seemed to have better luck for transformer life using magnetic transformers over electronic ones. I would use as few transformers as reasonable as close to the lights as you can hide them but still have access. Voltage drop and amprage becomes big issue fast on 12v systems.

 

[PetrosA]

LED is one option, but I think there's an easier one to implement. If you can get together with the carpenter making these cabinets (assuming they're custom made) I would ask that they run a light rail below each shelf so you can run Ambiance along each row. One 10 W bulb per pigeonhole should be just enough accent light for what they need, and the light source will be invisible. If it's not enough light, you might add more sockets later depending on how they arrange the rows/columns. The festoon bulbs may also need changing a few times per year, but they will be WAY faster to swap out. Bad socket? No problem. It would be a better system in a lot of ways.