"Why is it darker at the counter than in the rest of the kitchen?" Tessa asked that in April, about ten minutes after I finished swapping our two ceiling fixtures. She was right. The new lights made the room brighter overall, but when you stand at the counter they're behind you, and your own head throws a shadow right across the cutting board.
Why plug-in
Our kitchen has 1994 oak cabinets: a run of uppers on each side of the window over the sink, plus one over the fridge. The counters under those two runs are where all the chopping, coffee and mail sorting happens, and both sat in shade.
The cleanest version of under-cabinet lighting is hardwired, with the wiring hidden in the wall and a switch by the door. In our house, that means fishing cable through original 1952 plaster and cutting in a new switch box. I'm comfortable swapping a fixture with the breaker off and the tester in my hand, but opening plaster walls for a convenience upgrade was a much bigger job than the problem deserved. Battery puck lights sat at the other end of the scale, and I knew we'd stop recharging them by October. Plug-in LED bars that link together landed in the middle: real light, one cord, one switch and no holes in the walls.
What we bought
The cabinets have a lip along the bottom of the face frame, about three-quarters of an inch deep, which hides a slim light bar from anyone standing up. I measured the underside of each run. The left side fit two 24-inch bars and the right side fit one 18-inch bar. There's a wooden valance over the sink window, and a jumper cable could run behind it to connect the two sides.
One night we held a warm white bar and a cooler white bar under the cabinet with the overhead lights off. The cooler one made the laminate look like a hospital hallway, so the warm one won without much debate.
- Two 24-inch linkable LED bars: $54
- One 18-inch bar: $22
- Connector cables, including a 6-foot jumper: $14
- Plug-in power cord with an inline switch: $12
- Cord clips and a bag of short screws: $10
That's $112 for both runs.
Mounting and cord routing
Before committing, I stuck the bars up with painter's tape and tried a few spots after dark. Mounted at the back, near the wall, they lit up the backsplash nicely and left the front half of the counter dim. Mounted right behind the lip, they lit the whole counter, and you couldn't see the bars from anywhere but a kitchen chair. I settled on about two inches behind the lip.
The cord route was the part I'd been worried about, and it turned out to be the easy part. The two left bars link with a short connector. The 6-foot jumper runs up the side of the window trim, across behind the valance and down the other side, hidden the whole way. From the end of the right run, the power cord drops down the inside corner where the cabinet meets the wall and plugs into the outlet behind the coffee maker. Clips every eight inches keep everything tight to the cabinet. The inline switch is stuck under the lip at the right end, where your hand lands without looking.
My mistake was trusting the adhesive pads that came in the box. On the left run they held fine. On the right, the end closest to the range let go two days later, probably from heat and steam, and by Tuesday morning one bar was hanging by its connector. So I switched everything to screws. The screws in the box were long enough to poke through the bottom of the cabinet into the shelf above, which I found out by measuring, thankfully, and not by finding a screw tip next to the cereal. I bought shorter ones.
The counters are bright now, the plaster is untouched, and the only visible piece of the whole setup is a few inches of white cord behind the coffee maker. Tessa flips them on first thing every morning and leaves the overheads off.
Trip count: 2. One for the lights, one for screws a quarter inch shorter.
