I’ve been reading through past posts trying to decide on layout lighting. Much has been written and I’m trying not to re-hash past topics. One topic not clear to me was of all the different types of layout lighting methods discussed, I was not able to find much on the long term effects of lighting and fading. My layout room is the rough wiring stage and I’m ready to decide on a lighting type. I’m planning to mix recessed for general lighting and track lighting for highlighting the layout itself.
Steam: When I first read your post, I thought you were asking about fading as in dimmers. It would appear that you are referring to the annoying fading effect which is most pronounced between flourescent lighting and ground cover. You know, where the layout ends up with everything the color of oatmeal after a few years. The culprit here is, I believe, the UV produced by flourescent tubes, as I haven’t heard anything about incandescent lighting causing this. You have two options. One is to use a diffuser between the lamps and the layout. That would be the opaque plastic sheet the light shines through. You would have to pick a material which is UV resistant, similar to polycarbonate lenses in glasses and sunglasses. The better option is to get UV filtering tubes which slide over the lamp. These were originally designed for safety in case the lamp shattered, but if you get the UV filters, they will mostly prevent the fading we all hate. Look here for an example: http://www.neu-tech.net/prd_filtered_tubes.htm Hope that helps, Jeff
Yes, I am refering to the annoying fading effect of layout room lighting. Sorry for any confusion in my original post. Is flourescent the worst offender? How about Halogen?
Haven’t heard anything about Halogen fading, but would suspect that it should also be OK. But keep in mind that it generates a lot of heat, worse than incandescent, and will tend to cause heat-related issues even on surfaces a distance away. I have a high powered Halogen desk lamp, and I work on one of those self-repairing desk pads for cutting. The lamp is about 18 inches above the work surface, and after a while the radiant heat from the lamp causes the work surface to distort a remarkable amount. Flourescent, on the other hand, has two advantages; It’s cheap to run, and doesn’t produce much heat relative to output. Generally, the Halogen lights are power hogs, and the incandescent fall in the middle (depending on wattage). For my own layout, I’m going a different route. I have a basement with the standard 7 ft. ceiling, plus a dropped ceiling slightly below the joists. The Halogen would be too close to my bald head, and the track lighting hangs down even more (I’d guess that’s why you were interested in Halogen, as the fixtures are generally smaller than standard incandescent track fixtures). So I will be using a combination of several colors of rope lighting (blue for night for a beautiful moonlight effect, red and orange for sunset effects) plus daylight spectrum flourescents for day lighting, all tucked into a valance above the benchwork. I will be controlling the rope lighting intensity with dimmers which I got from a company called X10, controlled by variable outputs from my Chubb I/O system. Once I integrate those with a fast clock, I will have realistic lighting cycles between day, sunset, and night. I hope. The rope lighting, if you are interested, you can get from Home Cheapo. It’s pretty inexpensive, and can be connected daisy chain style. So, as long as you watch the amperage, you can string one long light the whole length of your mainline for each color and control the individual colors with one dimmer each (these X10 controllable dimmers are really cost effective). Hope this helps.
Whoops, actually I will be tucking the red and orange ropes behind my mountaintops, as I will leave a gap between them and the backdrop, with a little tray the ropes sit in, so the lighting shines up onto the backdrop. But you get the idea.
How are you mounting the rope lights? How far above the layout will they be (except the red/orange ones - you already mentioned them)?
Interesting. I’ve heard some mention of using rope lighting along with X-10 controllers. I’m going to do some research on this idea.
My situation is similar to yours - although my train room partially resides under a sunken living room and I’ll be using a drop ceiling (with the bare minimal drop). So there’s not much room for any type of lighting that will hang below the ceiling. My other problem is that a HVAC duck trunk runs through a portion of the room too. I’ve boxed it in and planned on using track lights for that area. But I suppose I can install a valence and try incandescent or rope lights for this area too.
Have you experimented with how much rope lighting you need to give good daylight effects?
Other than general room lighting, will the rope lighting be one of the primary sources of light on the layout?
Actually, the rope lighting, even in the clear color, is a little underwhelming for daylight. My hope was to use flourescent lighting for daylight, probably dimmable. As the daylight fades, I would bring up the orange and red, then as the orange faded it would leave the red, which would fade as the blue came up to provide the night lighting. I surmise that the clear ropes would work just fine, you would just have to string 4-6 parallel ropes to get adequate lighting. The problem you run into at that point is the total amperage load, as the ropes are a great special effect, but fairly inefficient for daylight.
For the flourescents, I would go with industrial strip fixtures, which are fairly cheap except for the dimmable ballasts, which cost more than the standard type. I would mount them to the back of the front verticle face of the valance. That way, any shadows will be thrown away from the viewer.
The rope lighting I would mount to the inside of the top of the valance, which I build as an upside down box, without bottom, suspended 18-24 inches above the scenery. Once you minimize the ceiling lighting, the layout acquires a “viewing box” effect, with darkness above the valance and below the benchwork
The red and orange (actually amber) would lay in a polished metal tray about 1" deep and 2" wide behind the hilltops and treetops. Since this is mainly a backdrop wash type of effect, 1 rope of each would be sufficient.
The blue is an interesting effect, as it only looks good when the lights are low. The effect is like a full moon on a winter night. Since my layout is set in late fall at higher altitudes, the little pockets of snow in the hollows really pop and will always get that “Wow” effect from the civilians.
As to coverage, I have experimented with installing it in a back and forth array, kind of snake-like, and also with parallel runs. Two parallel rows look pretty good, three are even better. The snake pattern fall
As a word of warning about X10, we (our electrican) installed an elaborate X10 system controlling over a dozen lights when we built our new house six years ago. By the 5 year point the entire system had failed, bit by bit. Our electrican had installed some too and they met a similar fate. I’d suggest that if you use it, limit to components that can be easily replaced. Ours was mostly built into the house construction and is there forever.
Actually, my experience with X10 components supports the assertion that you get what you pay for. They are very inexpensive and do fail, exactly as dgraham noted above. For home lighting you can use commercial dimming systems which work without frequent failure, but the cost is steep.
My plan is to develop a lighting cabinet as the nexus fo the rope lighting, and to cool it properly, as I suspect that heat is behind dimmer failure. Due to the rope lighting’s feature of chainability (new word!), I could conceivably need as few as 3 dimmers. If I wanted to add a lightning flash effect I could flicker a blue or white rope light via a digital output from the Chubb system, which is easy to do and requires no dimmer.
As inexpensive as X10 components are, I’m not averse to stocking spares and replacing on failure. This is how industrial automation programmable I/O systems started a couple of decades ago. I can remember replacing components regularly, and they were NOT cheap. That problem was solved by adding cooling packages to the I/O cabinets. Once we did that, the failures ended. I would be inclined to believe that is the problem behind the X10 components, as they are electronic and if they work in the beginning then component failure has to be the culprit, and heat and voltage problems are the only two likely causes.
That said, if anyone out there can recommend better quality dimmers which can be controlled via PC software (I’m using Visual Basic), I’m definitely all ears. I may explore low cost mini-PLC chassis/I/O systems, but the problem of the communication between the VB application and the dimming hardware remains the stumbling block. I refuse to spend thousands to go to industrial grade components.
I’m also in the rough wiring stage and facing the same decisions. I am planning to mount fluorescent fixtures in the center of the room, with UV filter sleeves, and also use track lighting over the layout. The fluorescents will do fine for construction, etc., while the halogen track will look really sharp for showing the layout and operation. In my previous layout room, I used halogen track exclusively and while it looked great, both the heat and the electricity usage were issues. I calculate that for full coverage of my new space I will need to dedicate two 20-amp circuits to the track lighting.
BTW, SimonJeff, I have never before heard a 7’ ceiling height referred to as standard. All four of the houses in which I have lived have/had 8’ basement ceilings and I personally have never seen anything less. Interesting.
Hi ther, i have an interesting solution ive never seen elsewere. I have installed this in my train room and it looks great. The items are called “puck” lights. They are designed for under the cabinit. You can go to home depot or lowes and get 5 of these for about 30.00. They are easy to work with, and are 20 watt, dimmable, and a breaze to work with. I have had a set for over 5 years now on my work bench and have never had to replace a bulb.
Here is what i did with my drop ceiling. First i marked where i wanted the lights. THen i removed the panel and used a 2 - 3/4" drill bit (about 22.00 retail) to make the hole in the ceiling tile. Get the drill with the pilot hole attachment, its worth the extra couple of bucks. Then i cut a few 4"x4" squares out of scrap 1/8" masonite. THis became the backing for the light to drop thru the hole. After that simplly plug them into a outlet. You can use a dimmer in the wall or inline in a extension cord. The simplicity of this system is that it is really easy to replace a bad light. Also the color of the lights is a very warm glow, excelent for building and working under. They do not get hot and i have had my ceiling done for about 6 months now and have had no problem.
Bill
http://www.lightinguniverse.com/products/view.aspx?family=148113
Steamnut,
You are correct, and I misspoke slightly. My ceiling is about 7’ below the dropped tile, and about 8’ to the floor above. My problem stems from the enclosures around the two I-beams which span and support the floor above, perpendicular to the joists, and which drop the clearance to significantly under 7’. My plan is to run the valances up to this box-out, with a break in the valance/lighting system across the box-out. They are only about 12" wide, and I’m less than 5’9". It’s a good thing we get shorter as we age, which might be one reason older folks prosper in this hobby[;)]
Crossracer,
Interesting solution indeed. If these are the lights which come with an extension cord they all plug into, and which you have to mount a male plug onto the end of each light’s cord, then they are what I use under my kitchen cabinets. Incidently, the link you provided shows that the puck lights are $28 each, although I believe they come in sets of 3 or 5.
I am curious as to your experience with these. I find that the bottom shelf in the cabinet gets quite warm above the light, the fixtures get too hot to touch when on, and I have dimmers on the circuits not only for the effect, but because if they are run at full voltage a lamp burns out on average once every month or so. I limit the dimmers to about 80% and the failures stop.
In addition, I have had a problem with the glass falling out of the fixture’s cover when they get hot. Do you have this problem? They came from Home Cheapo, so I think we’re talking about the same items.
Also, as you are undoubtably aware, you cannot touch the lamp itself or the fingerprint will cause a hot spot and the lamp will fail.
If these fixtures you have don’t have these traits and indeed run cool, let me know, as the heat from these is a problem.
One more thing; at that height what lighting coverage do you get? I found in the kitchen, above the countertops, I had to install one about every 30-36 inches to get good lighting, and if I followed that guideline for my layout I would need about 50 of these, which translates to 1000 watts, or about 10 amps with the resistance from the wiring. Not a problem current-wise as I have a 50 amp subpanel to feed the trains, but it would sure be a warm room! And with a cost of ~$1400 (at $28 each), there is the money factor. Even at $30 for 5, it’s still ~$300.
Nice method of integrating the fixtures with the ceiling tiles. I love the clean look!
Actually i am a full time firefighter, so heat was my first concern. HOwever i have had no problem with these other than the slightly warm on the back after prolonged use. Plus the ceiling tiles i have are fire rated as are most are. These are the ones from home cheapo (love that) and as i said i have had nothing but success. As for amount of light coverage i cant honestly say except i feel it is plenty bright enough for my eyes.
Right now i have these plugged into a wall, however my goal was to first see if these worked well, than later to add a couple of wall unit sliders so i could control the lighting.
At home depot you can get one of these for about 8-10 dollars. It is quite inexpensive to see if you like what ive done. The HUGE advantage is the ability to precicly place the light where you need it.
Bill
Funny … no one’s mentioned Christmas lights !!!
I mounted the large outdoor style Christmas lights behind my valence all the way around the room. The bulbs are one foot apart on the string, so one string will do 24 feet of layout. The bulbs themselves are rated at 7 watts each and I personally like the “color” they emit. Another bonus is the fact the sockets are the same size as micro-wave bulbs. The advantage to this is if you have a deeper scene that requires more light, you can easily replace the 7 watt Christmas bulbs with either 15 / 25 / 40 watt micro-wave bulbs.
I have a total of five strings in my layout room ( purchased AFTER Christmas for $10 each ) all of which runs through a 2000 watt motorized dimmer. It’s all worked like a charm for over 14 years now.
Mark.