Our new RV rig has a floor-to-ceiling pantry with narrow doors and deep shelves. Its position is not really convenient to the room lighting around the area, and this makes it quite difficult to see what is stored at the back of the long shelves.
I thought long and hard about the best way to illuminate the interior of the RV pantry with LEDs. Its seven shelves are 9 inches wide and 24 inches deep. Two vertical doors cover the front. It was obvious there had to be individual lighting for each of the shelves.
To make matters more difficult, there is no ready source of 12-volt DC in or near the pantry area, and the pantry walls and shelf floors made of solid oak.
My solution was to build a string of ZL3 Lightsticks that I could attach to the pantry door.The trick was to create a string of lights with a length of dual-lead, stranded speaker wire of 18- to 22-guage size. I used speaker wire where the power and ground strands could be easily identified.
First, I stripped one half inch of the 24-gauge solid-core wires of the zipLEDs to bare wire.
Next, I located the landing sites along the length of the speaker wire I wanted to place the ZL3s.
Third, at a landing site I pushed an embroidery needle (backend embedded in a wine cork) into the speaker wire through the insulation and through the metal strands and out the other side to create a hole big enough to take the 24-gauge zipLED wire. I created a hole in the ground strand and another in the +12v strand about half an inch apart.
Fourth, I threaded the two wires of the zipLED through the appropriate holes in the speaker wire, ground to ground strand, +12v to the power strand. I wrapped the extra zipLED wire around the speaker wire to hold it in place. Since the zipLED wires were separated by one-half inch, they did not touch and short out. After checking continuity, a small amount of insulating paint or tape can be used to cover the bare wires.
Fifth, I repeated steps 3 and 4 for each of the landing sites.
Sixth, I placed a 12VDC battery in the back of the top shelf and brought power to the front. I attached the battery +12v line to one side of a single-pole ON/OFF switch in. I attached the power strand of the speaker wire to the other side of the switch. I connected ground from the battery to the ground strand of the speaker wire. Operating the switch applied power to the entire string of ZL3s and they all lit up.
The seventh step was to peal the double stick tape from the back of the ZL3s and attached them to the back of the pantry door at an appropriate height for each shelf. I then pulled the speaker wire semi-taut and stapled it to the pantry door.
The final step was to clean up the installation and make sure everything was well-secured and not binding.
One alternatives with this kind of project is to use the ZL1 LightDot. It gives 40% of the lumens of the ZL3 and is a bit cheaper.
Another variation is to use some other kind of switch to turn power ON and OFF, such as a door closure type switch which would automatically turn ON the lights when the door was opened and turn them OFF when the door was closed.
And, if you have rig +12VDC and ground lines accessible within your pantry, you can tap into that rather than use a battery.
Visit www.prudentrver.com to learn more about the products used in this project.
Sam Penny, the Prudent RVer
The proverbial photo would have been worth the proverbial 1000 words.
Posted by: ray nardo | September 18, 2011 at 01:04 PM