Under Cabinet Lighting

The Light That Actually Lands on Your Work

Stand at your counter on a December evening and look down. If the only light in the room comes from the ceiling, it is behind you, and your head and shoulders cast a shadow right where the knife and the cutting board are. Upper cabinets make it worse by blocking the ceiling light from reaching the back half of the counter at all. Under cabinet lighting fixes this in the most direct way possible, by putting the light source above the work and in front of you.

In a Bellevue kitchen, where the window over the sink offers little help from late October on, this is often the single change that makes the biggest difference for the money.

What We Install and Why

There are three common styles of under cabinet light, and they are not equal.

Puck lights

Round fixtures spaced along the cabinet bottom. They are inexpensive, but they throw circles of light with dim gaps between them, and on a glossy counter you see every one reflected as a bright spot. We rarely recommend them for a working counter.

Linear bars

Slim fixtures a foot or more long. Better than pucks, and fine in some situations, but joints between bars can still show as dark breaks along a long run.

LED strip in a channel

Continuous LED tape mounted in an aluminum channel with a frosted diffuser. The channel spreads heat, the diffuser hides the individual diodes, and the light is even from one end of the run to the other. This is what we install in most kitchens. It is also the easiest to fit neatly under both framed and frameless cabinets.

Placement Matters as Much as the Fixture

The most common installation mistake is mounting the light against the back wall. It washes the backsplash in a bright band, highlights every grout line and uneven tile, and leaves the front of the counter where you work comparatively dim. We mount the channel toward the front third of the cabinet bottom, angled or diffused so the light falls across the counter.

The fixture should also be invisible when you are standing. Framed cabinets usually have a recessed bottom that hides it. Frameless cabinets often have a flat bottom, so we add a light rail, a small strip of matching trim along the front edge, to hide the channel from view.

Color, Brightness and Dimming

We match color temperature to the rest of the room, typically 2700K to 3000K, and use LEDs with a color rendering index of 90 or higher so food, wood and stone look like themselves. Brightness is chosen for the counter, not the ceiling, and every run is on a dimmer. Bright for prep, low for a night light glow when the rest of the house is dark.

Dimming LEDs well depends on matching the driver and the dimmer. A mismatch causes flicker, buzzing or lights that never quite go off. We specify both together, and we place the drivers somewhere you can reach them later, such as inside an upper cabinet or above a microwave, rather than sealed behind drywall.

Refit or Remodel

In an existing kitchen we can usually run wiring with small, patched openings in the wall above the counter, and tie the new lights to a switch location that makes sense. If the cabinets are sound and you like them, this is often a job measured in days, not weeks.

If you are planning a full kitchen remodel, under cabinet lighting is far easier and cleaner to install while the walls are open. Wire runs, switch boxes and driver locations are drawn into the plan and inspected with the rest of the rough in electrical through the City of Bellevue.

Things We Check First

• Whether your cabinets are framed or frameless and what the bottom looks like
• How glossy the counter and backsplash are, which affects glare
• Whether there is an existing circuit nearby with spare capacity, or whether a new one is needed
• Where a switch or dimmer can live that you will actually reach for

Call (425) 627-2427 and we will come out in the evening to look at your counters under the light you have now.