How to install LED Strip Lights – Under Cabinet Lightstrips for your Smart Home!

hey guys what's going on today i'm gonna be installing some lighting in my kitchen both above and below my cabinets and of course it's gonna work with homekit i'm gonna show you exactly how i installed mine where i'm running the power cords and even how you can cut your light strips to create gaps for things like you know the microwave or maybe a window that you need to go around and in the end we're gonna have some awesome lighting for the kitchen that works with a home kit let's go [Music] yo what's up guys thanks so much for joining me if you're new here welcome my name is shane and on this channel i'm building an easy smart home using home kit with new videos released every sunday right here now today's video is sponsored by voco link and will actually be using their ls2 light strips for today's installation and if you've watched enough of my videos in the past you'll know that i really do like the vocalink products they make a number of high quality affordable home kit products many of which i've been using in my personal home kit setup here for years so big thanks to vocal link for sponsoring today's video and for sending me out these light strips to use for today's installation so i recently had a backsplash installed in my kitchen it was sort of a gift to the wife for her birthday and it looks great we're very happy with it but now i've just got to get some home kit lighting back there to really make it pop and i must say this is probably the first smart home project that my wife is actually excited about now the tricky part in today's installation is going to be creating this gap underneath the microwave and completely hiding all the wiring what i'm actually going to do is cut the light strip and customize it so we can run a gap right there and continue the lights along the other side of the microwave so to get this job done i'm going to be using two of the vocalink ls2 light strips and one extension i'll also be using some inexpensive solderless connectors and extension wire to help us with that gap we need to create underneath the microwave now i'll put everything we talked about today in the description below if you want to check that out so let's head on down to the kitchen and get started okay so here we are in my kitchen and as you can see we got my new backsplash back here here let me get that so you can see so up here i'll actually be replacing an old ls1 voco link light strip with the newer ls2 just so it'll match the effects and everything and this will be pretty easy in this corner above the fridge i actually have a a little gap so it's really easy to install so i can actually run my power cord right down that gap and plug it in right behind my refrigerator so that's going to be easy we're going to be using one light strip down here and we're going to use those solderless connectors in order to create that gap underneath the microwave and to power this light strip i'm actually going to be using a hidden outlet that's up here and here we go you can see i've already drilled my holes i got my power cord running through here all right so stepping back here you can see kind of how i have it powered just running that power strip all the way down here and so here is my connection for my light strips and we'll plug it in here mount it underneath we're going to create that gap under the microwave and then extend the light strip all the way for the rest of the area there now what i'm probably gonna do also afterwards is just use some kind of home kit button and attach it up underneath one of the cabinets hidden away i can do something like a single tap turns on and off the bottom light and a double tap on that button turns on and off the upper light and maybe a long press turns them both on i'm probably going to do something like that just for a physical control of both of these light strips as well which will be a nice little touch all right so with that said i've done all my measurements uh we're gonna go create the gap for that microwave right there with our solderless connections then we're gonna come back down here and get it all hooked up let's go okay so this process we're doing here can be done essentially with any light strip you just have to make sure you get the right accessories for the light strip you have so because this is a four pin light strip that we're gonna be modifying today i got accessories that are four pin accessories so for example if we look here this says ten pack four pin led connectors so this is for a four pin light strip it's actually easy to tell because if you look closely you will actually see four pins right here another way to tell if it's not obvious on your light strip so if we look right here closely you can see there's four soldered points so that means this is a four pin light strip and i will put links to everything that i got down below essentially i got two things this all came in one pack and then this i got separately okay so this pack right here came with just some little attachments for the wall which will be helpful in some places it came with these which are really great for going around corners or if you need small little gaps you can use this we have just these basic connectors here that's used for connecting two light strips together and then we have these little l shape if you have a right corner or something like that you need to go around you can use these then it came with this long extension wire this is actually what we're going to be using to span across our microwave there unfortunately with this pack it did not come with a great way to connect this to the light strip these don't really work these are really for going directly into the light strip and not the cable so what i did is i actually picked up this pack right here so these right here have two sides the light strip will go into this side this side actually has four little channels that this wire will feed into okay and we'll use this to connect the light strip to that extension wire and then we'll do the same thing on the other end of that microwave i'm going to need to cut my light strip here run that extension wire right here all the way underneath my microwave and then have the rest of the light strip here okay so the first thing we need to do is cut our light strip like i said all right now again i'm going to be cutting right here along these connectors so i just want to try my best to cut really evenly right down the middle nice and straight okay there we go that actually looks pretty good nice clean cut there all right so i'm going to use this again to connect the light strip to my extension cable right here to do that you're going to simply put this in here and you're going to want to keep in mind where your positive and everything is so you can line those up so i'm going to slip that in here you want to make sure that's good and tight if so if it's tough use some pliers to clamp that down now we'll take our wire that we've measured out already and i'm going to cut it that other end of that connector here and again remember where everything is so you can line them up i know that that positive was along the top here right here there's an arrow you can even see so that is going to be my black wire so i'm going to feed these into these channels best i can all the way in here and what's nice about these is that you don't have to do any stripping or anything of the wires uh there is some little sharp edges in there that actually does that for you and we're going to close this down and these are pretty tough to close down so you're going to probably want to use some pliers clamp down on that really tight okay and there we go that is one connection now we just need to connect the other side and do the same thing over there there you go we have our light strip connected now what we can do is plug it in and make sure it works make sure the colors change appropriately and that everything is connected right now i will say i don't like these connectors as much as these and i'll explain why these actually are a little tougher because there's no stripping and everything like that so you very well may have to wiggle you know this around a little bit on either side just in order to get that connection just right so you can do that once it's plugged in and once the the color should line up and match and everything uh but just know that i did struggle with this quite a bit initially but i just kept playing with it try to get that connection right between the two sides and once you get the connection for all the wires coming through you should be good to go now that's all we're doing with these but i did want to show you what to do in case you wanted to use some of these or let's just say you have a small gap and you just want to use one of these so this actually has these little connectors right here so you're going to want to kind of prop these up and i don't know if you can see that there's a little channel actually right here that you'll need to slip the light strip under so another thing to mention is you do want to get the right width so you know make sure you get the right width light strip or we're going to have to slide our light strip under there but first with a light strip like this you have to actually remove the silicone top if you're using one of these connections again if you're using one of those other ones you do not want to do that so to do this i'm just going to use a razor and very gently kind of cut right here get that little silicone cover off what i actually like to do is once i have a nice little cut go in and i actually like to just try to peel it off with my fingernails so i don't damage the actual light strip and there you go so see i got that silicone cover off right here and once you have that done you can just slip this again make sure you're positive grb all lines up green red blue and this will just slide right under there you might have to kind of force it a little bit slide under that lip [Music] you can close this side use your pliers close and then you can do the same thing over here then you have your little gap you can go around corners or whatever you need to do if you're using this kind of connection okay and so there we go i created my gap for my microwave and again i'm using this connector here now let's head back to the kitchen and all i have to do is stick this thing up plug it in and i should be good to go [Music] the bottom is installed i'm going to use some of these just little command command strips hooks to attach the wire underneath and hold it up and hope that that sticks and lasts over time if not i've got some screws that i can use also that came with one of those kits all right now let's change out those top lights so for this one we don't need to do anything special we're just going to use the standard ls2 vocal link light strip plus an extension so got this extension so that we can expand across the entire cabinets up there okay so there you go you can see everything is looking great got it installed we have that gap underneath the microwave just like i wanted now i set these up so that i can control them separately in home kit so just tap on their tile to turn each one on and off and i wanted to be able to control them separately just you know for different kinds of scenes and stuff like that so we can turn them on change colors i can add these to my automations now these lights do also support and google assistant if that's more your cup of tea you know i won't judge you but obviously we like using it in home kit speaking of home kit one thing that really sets the vocal link lights apart in my opinion is that they actually expose a custom light effect mode to home kit allowing me to create cool effects in my home kit scenes and automations let me show you so i have a scene right here called kitchen colors i can tap that and now we're gonna see our lights slowly transition and fade into uh different colors again not something you can do with other lights that i've found within homekit but i like this because now i can create custom automations and things for example i've got a code red alert scene that i set up when i tap this you'll see what happens this would be great for an automation you know if an alarm is triggered we can have this start flashing our lights you can get creative and do a lot of stuff with this let's change this to candle let me change that bottom one there to the candle also there you go and now we're i don't know if you can see that we're kind of getting like a candlelight effect here going on and you can change the intensity and everything of this but again really cool that you can kind of get these effects and use them in homekit one of the reasons why i really like the vocal link light strips now these vocal link light strips they work well they're reliable in home kit and they have some awesome lighting effects that you can use within home kit which really sets these apart and i've actually been informed that vocalink is working on that adaptive lighting feature for their light strips and hopefully that'll become available through a firmware update before the end of this year so that would be even better especially for something like this in the kitchen to have that adaptive lighting that kind of changes throughout the day and possibly the biggest selling point for them is that they're much more affordable than some of the other light strips out there available so all in all these are great light strips to consider if you're looking for something for your smart home so there you go that is my new cabinet lighting the wife is happy it works with home kit so you know i'm happy big thanks to vocal link for sponsoring today's video if you guys enjoyed this please give it a big thumbs up that does really help out the channel subscribe if you haven't and hit that bell icon so you get notified when we post new home kit videos every sunday right here and if you really want to support this channel even further consider hitting that join button down below to become a channel member big shout out to all of our current channel members you guys are awesome thank you all so much for joining me today and until next time see y'all later [Music] wow [Music]

Channel: Shane Whatley

Views: 523,726

Keywords: homekit, Apple Homekit, smart home, homekit apple, homekit devices, homekit smart home, affordable homekit, affordable homekit devices, home automation, smarthome, vocolinc, homekit lightstrips, best homekit lightstrip, under cabinet lighting, lightstrip installation, under cabinet lighting installation, how to install lightstrips in the kitchen, smart home lighting, smart home lightstrips, homekit lightstrip

Id: UfTd12dhAP8

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020