My friends have been giving me a hard time about not having backlighting for the whiskey bottles, so I finally gave in. I had considered it when I originally put the room together. My original plans were to hard wire it into the main switch of the room. Run lines behind the walls and tie the walls together via electrical dropped from the ceiling. All in it would have been a pretty involved wiring project and I estimated it to be around $300-400. I decided to not do it at the time as the room was already a pretty heavy investment.
I spent some time reviewing Amazon’s “spring sale” and came across a 64’ run of LED lights that would be more than enough to cover the shelves. I ordered them and tried them out behind the bottles as they are already diffused, but they came across too harsh. I had to order a set of black aluminum channels with diffusers to contain the lights.
I considered a few different options for how to mount them. Top down wouldn’t work because the shelves are high up and it would shine in your eyes. I considered routing a channel at the back of the shelf, but when I just tried the lights behind the bottles on the diffuser channels, they looked great. Because the room is typically dark and the channels are black, you really don’t even notice them. The channels with lights have enough weight that I didn’t even bother to mount them or screw them in place. They sit at the back of the shelf and the bonus is that if I ever change my mind on how I want to configure things, it’s easy enough to change.
Running the wiring was the most challenging aspect of this project, but even this was relatively easy. There was enough space on the long shelves to slide it behind and on the shorter shelves, I had to cut a small notch to accommodate the wires. They are all in the corners and because they are coated in black, it’s not noticeable where they run.
Total cost of the project was $175:
- 65’ LED Lights $46
- Black Defuser Channels 20x 3.3’ $96
- 30’ of Black 18 Gauge Wire $15
- LED connectors $14
- WAGO Lever Nuts $4