Track lighting

Friday and today were track days. One of my customers decided on track lighting (almost 80 feet) for her downstairs rooms which will be living space with lots of artwork to be displayed. The layout was somewhat intimidating since I don’t have the ideal laser tools for layout of the double U shape in the main area and had to work around piles of wood trim on the floor to mark out 90s (using 3-4-5) and transfer them via laser to the ceiling, and the two U’s had to meet up, and I work alone 😉

All in all it went pretty smoothly and the ends of the U’s are only off by about 1/8-inch. For cutting the track I used a kick-ass variable speed benchtop band saw which I got from eastwood.com for a reasonable price.

I’ll be picking up the LED track heads tomorrow and try to get them turned on and get some pics of that as well.

Looks good Petros. Track lighting isn’t nearly as popular as it once was in the 90’s everyone had to have it in their house back then.

Nice work dude

Jimbo

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It isn’t as popular, but a lot of that has to do with the heads. When I show customers how many different styles are available, it becomes a pretty easy sell. This customer was pretty adamant that she wanted LED heads, and almost every month something new is coming out in that area. The sample head is mounted on the 8′ track on the right and it’s just a mini cylinder. Very low profile and doesn’t look 1970s at all. I like recessed lighting for some things, but when a customer tells me they have “a lot” of artwork to light or they want a hi-tech look, track or monorail are the go-to products.

was never a fan of track lighting but hey good work just the same….

Recessed lighting is great when you want to light horizontal surfaces like counters, tables or desks and for floors. With careful planning and layout, it can be good for lighting artwork, but it’s an expensive way to do it and you have to know pretty exactly what you’re lighting, how high it’s going to be hung, the dimensions, etc. or you find that the lights won’t cover it properly. 

Track is good if you have:

High ceilings

artwork

versatile floor plans or changing wall layouts (artwork).

A weak side of track lighting when you use it in rooms with lower ceilings is that you don’t get good general light on the floor or into the center of the room. I only recommend it for rooms like that when there will definitely be a lot of artwork and the walls can be used as reflective surfaces to bounce light back into the room. That was the plan in this house, even though the ceilings are about 9-feet high.

Nice work, man. I need to upgrade the lighting in the GF’s house. I’m not sure she’d go for track lights, though. It’d be totally badass in the garage…

BK13 wrote:

Nice work, man. I need to upgrade the lighting in the GF’s house. I’m not sure she’d go for track lights, though. It’d be totally badass in the garage…

Thanks. Just a heads up… these are WAC LED track heads. They’re nice, but salty at about $130/piece. The 80 ft. of 1 and 2 circuit track and 25 heads cost almost 5k just in materials, minus wiring and dimmers. You can do it much cheaper using $20 JUNO heads, single circuit track and LED PAR lamps.