My wife and I are completely refurbishing our new apartment, essentially tearing down everything. I thought it would be a terrific opportunity to dive into home automation. I have been reading quite a bit over the past week to get a sense of the land. The more I read, the more questions I have. So it is not overwhelming, I will break it into different posts over the coming days. First, I would like to build a system around Home Assistant+Matter over Thread. I understand the latter is not super common yet, but I would prefer to build something future proof and avoid having to deal with too many protocols..
So, the topic of the day is lighting. The first important point is that my wife is photosensitive and we generally both absolutely loathe direct lights. Given the configuration of the apartment, we thought of having LED strips behind cornices as our main lighting source in essentially all the rooms (3 bedrooms, bathroom, living room, kitchen). The total linear length is of the order of 100 meters. Having a color strips for them would be nice, but white accuracy is of higher priority as I would like to automate the color following a circadian rhythm. There is no use case I can think of where we need the individual LED to be addressable. Here is the setting I was thinking of:
Now, the questions:
- What is the maximum length I can go with a single controller and 24V, and not have any noticeable distortion in color and/or luminosity? I would prefer to keep the number of controllers to a minimum for simplicity and cost.
- We generally like really dim lights, are these strips performing well at low load factor? Flickering is a no-go for us.
- Given it is going to be being a cornice, with no direct sight line, how low can I reasonably go in LED density? I also like to keep the electricity bill as low as possible.
- I assume that the lower the LED density, the longer the strip can be?
- I keep reading about aluminum channel diffusers, are they necessary for this sort of setup or can I just install the strip directly in the cornice?
Your opinion on all this would be highly appreciated.