Cove Lighting 101: How to Save on Material Costs and Labor

Cove lighting adds elegance, sophistication, and dramatic effect to architectural design and décor. With this application, the light source and fixture hardware is hidden behind ledges, recesses, or valances, allowing for beautiful, diffused light to glow along the contours of ceilings or walls as if from nowhere at all.

Updating Older Cove Lighting

For businesses and homes with cove lighting that was installed more than a handful of years ago, the lighting is likely relying on T5 or T8 fluorescent tubes. These lamps have a life expectancy of just 20,000 hours and in many cases consumers are left with dull, flickering or even dark spots due to the hassle and labor cost of replacement. These existing applications can easily be retrofitted to LED to significantly reduce the amount of maintenance, along with energy costs. 

LED lighting is available in a range of color temperatures, to achieve the preferred atmosphere. It can also be paired with lighting controls to further enhance your ambient lighting effects.

Installing New Cove Lighting

For property owners looking to implement cove lighting for the first time, fluorescent tubes are now one of the least efficient light sources to maintain. Again, LED offers a much longer lifespan and much lower carbon footprint.

The Best LED Strips for Cove Lighting—and Why

Our Claris kits provide some particular advantages when it comes to cove lighting retrofits or installations. For one, the design minimizes the number of drivers needed. Here’s how:

With fluorescent installations, there’s a ballast for every fixture. For cove lighting, this can likely mean a ballast for every fluorescent tube. When it comes to other LED retrofit kits, the same situation likely occurs: a driver for every fixture. This adds time and cost for the installation and the added cost of the driver itself on top of it.

Some customers may also opt for LED tape lighting. While the flexible tape lighting may seem appealing, in many cases the LEDs are encapsulated in a rubber-like material which leads to heat. Electronics, plastics and heat are certainly not friends. The more heat, the faster plastics will break down and the more heat the faster those LEDs will discolor and begin to fade.

Enter: Gen 2 Claris LED retrofit solutions.

Designed and manufactured in Pennsylvania, these kits are extremely versatile, even beyond typical use cases such as troffers, wrap lights and industrial fixtures. Thanks to the innovative team at LED Living, customers can also install these high-performance LED light strips with a single power supply across multiple fixtures. The open strip and modular design allow for excellent air flow, with or without the optional, open-ended, snap on lenses and allows users to tailor to their needs without sacrificing performance or reliability all while saving you $$; and by the way, your UL safety certifications stay intact too.

To help our customers or, hopefully, soon-to-be customers better understand how this works, please take a close look at our example below.

For pricing, contact your local lighting distributor, or contact LED Living Technology to find your nearest distributor. If you’re interested in adding Claris kits to your product line, contact us here.

Learn more about Claris fluorescent-to-LED retrofit kits.

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