By: Marlene
DIY Tutorials, Inside My Home, Smart Homes, , , ,

How to Add Floating LED Light Feature To Your Staircase. Step-By-Step Tutorial

This LED lighting staircase has improved not just our experience of getting in and out the house -  but also at home walking from one room to the other as they all open to the hallway/staircase. Typically we would have to turn on and off lights but now, we just breeze walk and light comes on and off. Brilliant! Keep reading to learn how to do it at home, and how does it all work.
and yes… it is compatible with Apple Home Kit and Amazon Alexa

Meaning I can use my voice to control the light, on/off, change intensity, change color.

Products links :
 Philips Hue Personal Wireless Lighting 2 m Lightstrip
 Philips Hue Personal Wireless Lighting 1 m Extension Kit
 Philips Hue Personal Wireless Lighting Home Automation Bridge 2.0
 Philips Hue Intelligent Motion Sensor Smart Accessory

New exciting things we can do with this installation :

  • When I leave home, the light turns itself automatically off after a few minutes
  • When I arrive home, the light turns itself automatically on and stays on
  • Lights will come on when we walk through the hallway, during 11 pm and 7 am for 60sec
  • Every day at 10 pm, the brightness reduce by 50% and turns itself off at 11 pm
  • Every morning lights come on at 7 am
  • I can tell Alexa or use my phone, to change color to “warm white, cold white, pink, etc”

Disclaimer: I am not an electrician. We did this installation and did a cable-integration in the wall and plastered over, we are fairly confident there is no problem in doing so and we have a smoke detector in the hallway, however, I  cannot guarantee this installation will not cause any fire hazard, again I am not an electrician…

This is a perfect DIY activity to retrofit in your staircase handrail. We did an integration so that cables aren’t visible.
To achieve this look you need:

  • Power socket near the installation,
  • The electric material described below. I’ve included links as well but those products can be found at many retailers
  • A Claw Hammer, a pair of scissors
  • A plasterer to come fix the mess you’ve created :o) / to fill the cable-hiding
  • Painting material to paint over the fresh plastered area (mini-roller, wall-paint)
  • To control by voice: add Amazon Alexa / Apple Home Kit and a smartphone / Internet

The process :

  1. I first measured the handrail and determined how long I need the light strip to be. In my case, it was 2m + 2m extension strips. You can extend the original 2m light strip by up to 10 extension strips, so plenty!
  2. The extension kit can be cut to the dimension you need, there are dotted lines for you to cut at the RIGHT location.
  3. We went on to determined where we wanted the light strip to start and how we wanted to hide the cable, then we used a pen to note where on the handrail, and cut the strip where we wanted the light to finish.
  4. We connected the light to the power socket and switched it on to verify, the light strip worked before the cable wall-integration.
  5. Then the scary bit, hammering down a perfectly fine wall :O so that we could hide a small box and the cable.
    Note: we didn’t chip away any wall structure just the existing plaster. See below
  6. Plaster job
  7. Finally, we remove the peelable protection tape from the light strip - it comes with  a sticky tape already and we fixed it under the handrail and sand/painted the plaster once it had fully dry (about 2 days)

Hope you liked this article, let me know if you have any comments below.
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I will post better-looking pictures of the final look when we have the new stair carpet down.

Products links :
Philips Hue Personal Wireless Lighting 2 m Lightstrip
Philips Hue Personal Wireless Lighting 1 m Extension Kit
Philips Hue Personal Wireless Lighting Home Automation Bridge 2.0
Philips Hue Intelligent Motion Sensor Smart Accessory

 

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