Under cabinet lighting is a very convenient and useful lighting application for the kitchen. Lighting designers agree that the path to any beautiful, functional kitchen starts with excellent task lights. But at the same time, it’s also important to replace your cabinet lights in time, cause a broken kitchen task light can affect your efficient when you really need to get down to business, to cook a gourmet dinner or finally scrub down those countertops.
The service life of various cabinet lamps
Before you replace your under cabinet lights, you must better know some basical knowledge about different kinds of lights, especially the sevice life of them which directly related with your wallet.
- Halogen Under Cabinet Lights
Halogen lightbulbs have a far shorter lifespan than other bulbs, lasting for around 2,000 hours, or two years, when used for approximately three hours a day.
Xenon Under Cabinet Lights
A xenon light’s typical rated life is around 10,000 hours, lasting 5 times longer than the average halogen lamp.
Longer lifetimes – under cabinet lights are not impossible to access, but changing out old light bulbs is never a fun chore. With LEDs, light output does not diminish singificantly until after 25k – 50k hours – that is 10 to 20 years depending on your usage.
In short, we can see that the usage period of LED under cabinet lights is the longest, and the Xenon sevices longer than Halogen lights.
Which type should we choose?
Here I would love to quote two terms from home circuit installation to divide most of the kitchen cabinet lights into two kinds:
—-”concealed wiring lights”
—-”open wiring lights”
—-”concealed wiring lights” as a word suggest concealed means“Hidden”. So, this wiring is done inside the cabinets/walls.
—-“open wiring lights” are the type which need no complicated installation tricks, which always with a plug, and the cord is visiable just like the left side picture.
”concealed wiring lights”
- Prons:
- Aesthetically beautiful and clean. It is most as it is common type of electrical wiring used nowadays, as the surface look neat and clean.
- Cons:
- Not easily customizable in future. If you need to replace your cabinet light, you need better to know the type of your previous lights, therefore you do not need to punch your kitchen cabinet again to match the length of your lights.
- Installation is not easy. You may need to pay for a professional electrician to install the lights for you, if you are unfamiliar with the circuit.
- Hard to detect the faults.
- Prons:
- Easy to install. No need to pay for a electrician, you can install by yourself especially if you buy puck lights and led light bars.
- No need to punch your cabinets, for the wire line, you can hidden it with you
- Easy to replace. There are three kinds of under cabinet lights you can choose.
—-The puck lights. You can choose the rechargeable one, for this can save you lots of budget of buying battery.
—-The LED light bars. Here we suggest the cabinet light bars that can be connected together for more even lighting.
- Cons:
- It might not be pretty. If you’d rather have a light fixture with wires sticking out, then you can opt for other types of cabinet lights. But there are some ways you can hide the wires.