Under-cabinet and LED strip lighting for a kitchen
About 30 minutes
A kitchen is the one room where the ceiling light is in the wrong place for almost everything you actually do. As soon as you stand at the worktop, your own shadow falls across whatever you are chopping. The fix is light placed close to the work, under the cabinets or along the splashback, and the choice is between a small battery lamp you can move and a run of LED strip that stays put. This covers measuring, fixing and powering both, so the result is light where your hands are rather than somewhere your head is.
What you need
- A tape measure
- The lamp or strip for the run you measured
- A clean, dry surface to fix to
Step by step
- Measure the dark stretch. Stand at the worktop and measure where your shadow falls — that is the run to light, so measure each straight section separately.
- Clean the fixing surface. Wipe the underside of the cabinet dry and grease-free so the sticker or the strip adhesive grips and stays.
- Fix it close to the front edge. Mount the light near the front of the shelf so it falls on the work, not into the back of the cupboard.
- Set the brightness and timer. For the battery lamp, pick one of the two brightness levels and use the remote to set the timer or control several lamps together.
Light the worktop, not the room
Under-cabinet light is aimed at a single job: putting light onto the surface where you work. Before you buy anything, stand where you actually stand to cook and look at where the shadow falls — that is the strip you need to light, and it is rarely the whole length of the kitchen.
A small, movable lamp suits a short run over the main prep area; a full LED strip suits a long run of worktop where the shadow moves with you. Decide by measuring the dark stretch, not by how the kitchen looks in daylight.
Measuring a strip run
For an LED strip, measure the straight run you want to light along the underside of the cabinets, then round up to the nearest length the strip is sold in. Corners need two pieces rather than one bent hard around the turn, so treat each straight section as its own measurement.
The strip listed here is a flexible silicone tube, so it can follow a gentle curve, and it is waterproof — which matters in a kitchen, where steam and the occasional splash reach the underside of a cabinet more often than people expect.
How it sticks, and how it comes down again
A battery lamp is the easy route to fitting: the under-cabinet light here runs on AAA batteries and fixes with stickers or the screws supplied, so there is no wiring and it can move if the prep area moves. It is also remote-controlled, with two brightness levels and a timer that switches it off after 30 minutes.
One remote controls several of those lights together, which is the point most people miss — put one under each cabinet and one remote turns the whole run on and off, rather than reaching to each lamp in turn.
Power: batteries or a wired strip
The two approaches differ on power. The battery lamp is self-contained and takes ordinary AAA batteries, so it goes in a spot with no nearby socket and needs no charging cable left on the worktop. The trade is that the batteries are yours to replace.
The LED strip is the choice when the run is long or the light needs to be an always-there part of the kitchen rather than a lamp you switch. Decide on the basis of the run length and how permanent you want the light, not on looks — both can be tidy when they are fitted where the work happens.
Inside cabinets and under the counter
The same reasoning applies off the main worktop. A pantry, a corner cupboard or a row of shelves is lit far better by a small light inside it than by the ceiling, and a battery lamp or a short strip both do it.
Wherever you put them, fit the light close to the front edge of the shelf rather than at the back, so the light falls on what you are reaching for instead of firing into the back of the cupboard.