Seems a long time since my last “design” post (and indeed it is — nine months or thereabouts), but that’s largely because I’ve not had to think too much about what I was doing. Once the basic plan was decided much of what has happened thus far followed on naturally.
Now however I need to start thinking about electrics, and in particular lighting, as I’ll need to know what I’m going to do as I work through lining the walls.
Discussing the lighting with someone who is a little further ahead with their own build than I am led me to believe that their solution, about which I did originally have concerns if I were to use it, would actually work in my case. So the intention now is to install multi-coloured LED strip lights in a recessed aluminium channel in the walls, all the way around from the window between the warm room and the scope room to the external door. The LED strips come with red, green, blue and white LEDs, but I’ll just ignore the green and blue ones, using dim red or bright white depending on my needs at the time. My intention is to fix the ply lining sheets horizontally, so that the recessed channel can sit on top of them, 1220mm off the level of the floor.
I have also ordered a wifi-attached controller for the LEDs, so I can turn them on and off from an app on my phone or similar device. It’s also possible to use a wall-mounted controller and I may do that if I don’t like using the phone, or I may attempt to hack the protocol for the controller (assuming someone else hasn’t done so already) and do my own thing. Looking at the images of the wall-mounted controller I’m inclined to believe there’s some sort of PWM control system with the pulse being created by connecting and disconnecting the return line from the LEDs. Otherwise it would have been quite nice just to have a standard domestic wall switch unit with “red” and “white” switches.
All the parts have apparently now been dispatched, so I should see what they actually look like in the next few days. The LED strips come in ten metre lengths and I think I’ll end up using nearly all of it. If it looks good then I may well look to do the same thing in the warm room ceiling, but I won’t need anywhere near as much of it — perhaps two strips about 2.4m long, or a single U-shaped run where the bottom of the “U” is above my desk.
