The pantry in our new house has bifold doors. When I renovated the pantry and added cabinet modules and drawers, I also added LED strip lighting all around the perimeter of the door opening. The LED lighting is a dramatic upgrade - it's really bright, white, and it illuminates all the shelves in the pantry.
I wanted to add automatic control of the LED strip lighting. I decided to use the
Insteon Wireless Open/Close Sensor as my Insteon scene controller, and a standard
2477S Switchlinc On/Off Switch to control the light circuit. When I purchased the sensors, I initially planned to put two in - one for each of the matching bifold doors, left and right. When I went to install them, I found that it would be much easier just to add the sensor with battery on one door, and the magnet on the other door. As soon as one door or the other is opened, it opens the reed switch in the sensor, and the controller issues it's on command. This is what the installation looks like:
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| Sensor screws to the left bifold door, near the edge close to the top of the door. Note the label on the battery with the installation date - I've gotten into that habit with my smoke detector batteries - makes it very easy when troubleshooting to identify old batteries that may need replacing. I use a Brother P-Touch for doing all my labels. |
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| Measure from the top of the door frame to the center of the sensor, in order to place the magnet at the same height. |
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| Installation of the magnet. The kit comes with good quality 3M double sided tape, but I prefer screwing the sensor and magnet down. The kit comes with the screws. |
It took about 5 minutes to link the Insteon Wireless Open/Close Module to my Switchlinc On/Off Wall Switch, using my ISY-994i interface. The Open/Close Module is the controller, the Switchlinc switch is the responder. Now the LED light strips illuminate as soon as the doors are cracked open, and shut off as soon as the doors are completely shut. I also wrote a simple program in my ISY-99i to shut the LED lights off if 10 minutes passes with the doors left open. It's a very convenient upgrade.
Here's some photos of the strip lighting installation. I ripped some angled strips of plywood to direct the LEDs output towards the center of the vertical shelves on the sides, and almost directly down for the strips installed across the top. I then fastened the strip lights to the plywood using the supplied adhesive backing tape. I used kits from Costco - quite inexpensive, but I exceeded the maximum number of strips on a single power adapter, so I had to arrange two power adapters to power the setup.
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| The completed pantry with the strip lighting on. |
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| I removed the old light fixture, replaced it with a standard outlet plug and lighting box cover for power outlets. Then, I just plugged in the supplied power adapters. Notice the cable tie bases - self adhesive, and the zip ties. They help make a neat, inconspicuous installation. |
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| The top LED strip light mounted on a ripped piece of plywood. I used one side of the plywood strip to mount the low voltage electrical lead using self adhesive cable tie bases. The top portion of the side strip is also visible. |
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| Lots of clean white light when illuminated. |
Great post
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