Red Deer Electrician: Recessed Lighting Options for Interior Homes and Businesses

Introduction to Recessed Lighting

Hey everybody, welcome back to LumenTek Electrical’s YouTube channel. I’m Trevor and I’m here talking with Ryan. He’s the owner operator of LumenTek Electrical and he has an electrical contracting business in Red Deer and Blackfalds services that whole area. And if you’re looking for an electrician, he’s the guy to call.

All right, so today we’re going to be talking about recessed lighting. What is recess lighting? Well, I’ll let you take it from there. Pot lights is the most common form. So, yeah. So, people call them pot lights. Recess. I call it recess lighting because I’m a snob. pot lights because they used to be actually a big pot at the back of it, right? And, then you just put your fixture or your luminaire inside. Today, they’re kind of not the same. They’re not really a pot light anymore, are they? No, they’re flat. Most of them are the same thickness as your drywall. They’re about Yeah./ inch thick. And anywhere you can drill a hole, you can put a pot light. There you go.

So, I mean, they’re not, you know, pot lights per se, but they’re called pot lights. So, tell me, you know, the best applications are obviously becoming more and more popular. Tell me some of the reasons why.

Benefits and Features of Recessed Lighting

They’re nice because they’re small, they’re thin, you can kind of put them anywhere, and you don’t have to worry about ceiling clearances cuz they don’t hang down at all. they don’t really go out of style cuz there’s nothing really to look at. Like it’s just a round circle on your ceiling. Same color as the paint. You don’t really notice it unless it’s turned on. They give really good light because they spread really wide and normally rooms will have quite a few of them in there. Like you’ll have like one per corner or more depending on what the room’s used for.

And they Yeah, they put out really nice light. They dissipate well. You don’t get shadows. Yeah. Really energy efficient. Yeah, cuz they’re LEDs, right? Nowadays, they’re all LEDs. You’re not going to get some kind of incandescent thing anymore. Really hard to find if you’re tough to find.

What about the color range? So, tell us about some of the color ranges you can get with your recess lighting. They’re all kind of coming now with five different colors. So, you can do soft white, which is super yellow, and then everything in between, and just daylight, which is pretty white. yeah, it’s kind of personal preference, whatever someone wants. Usually, if we’re adding to an existing house, we’ll find whatever’s in the house and we’ll match it to that so they’re kind of consistent through the house. Yeah. Nice. So, you can have whatever color temperature you like.

I’m more of a warm white guy, not necessarily a daylight guy. just seems too clinical and harsh for me when it’s too bright. So, like 6,000 Kelvin brightness is a bit too much for me. I’m more like, you know, 3,200ish, 3500. I like that. It’s a little bit warmer, more natural light. Kind of like this guy here. I like that color. But for you, you can choose whatever color you want.

Specialty Lighting and Installation Options

Now, what about specialty recess lightings and other types of lighting? Let’s say you’re doing cabinet lighting, rollick lighting, stair lighting. What other kinds of things are you doing or available for people? yeah, all the above. All the above. Yeah. Yeah, we can pretty much put lights everywhere. Yeah, the nice thing too, a lot of the pot lights now are rated for indoor use, outdoor use, showers, everything. So Okay. So before like back in the day, you used to have to have a vapor barrier and you had to have special vapor hats over the cans and all of that fun stuff. And now that’s kind of gone away cuz you can just keep it all within the vapor barrier that’s in the ceiling already, right? Very easy to install, much less headache for the electrician.

So what is the average like cost to put in a set of recess lights in say a living room or a kitchen? Yeah, it depends on accessibility. So if we can get up in the attic and fish all of our wires that way, it’s cheaper, it’s easier. The hardest ones are when there’s a floor above it. So if it’s in a basement that’s already finished, then it’s quite a bit more work, right? A lot more difficult. But they kind of average around $120 to $130 per light. Mhm. Obviously, if there’s more, it’s cheaper because we’re right already there. Already there. Already drilling holes. Might as well get it done while you’re there.

Now for you you said you’re going to be doing it in your own house. Yeah. Where are you putting recess lights? But all the difficult spots. All the difficulties. All the hardest parts. Always how it goes. Okay. Yeah. So, we got upstairs. We’re doing a bunch of pot lights and it’s a vaulted ceiling so there’s no access above it. Perfect. We’ll be cutting drywall and fish. Frustrated. Yeah. Lots of fish rods. Lots of fishing. Good. I don’t miss that stuff at all. Surprisingly, I don’t miss it. Yeah. Weird, right?

No, I did that for a long time doing lots of renovations and stuff. But, yeah. No, I love recess lighting. I love the look of it. Love the options. What about dimmable, non- dimmable, specialty colors? Like what do you normally do for customers? What are some options? Most common options we kind of have are different. There’s gimbal and flat pot lights. So you have flat ones obviously for flat ceilings, but then if you have a vaulted ceiling, most people want to go with the gimbal ones. So you can adjust them to point down. Otherwise, you just get them pointing across the vault and that doesn’t really benefit a whole lot, right? So it’s, you know, they tilt. So you can Yeah, he set them to get a better angle on it. Yeah, exactly. Nice.

Okay, so yeah, we have those are the two most common. there’s different colors available. So you can get like white trims, black, gold, and bronze. Oh, basically any kind of metal color you get different color pot lights for. I assume there’s going to be different prices for those as well with the fancier trim. Yeah, exactly. Nice. But hey, I mean, if you have a really nice home and you’ve got some more custom features and accutrans in it, then maybe you like the polished brass look or black would be nice as well. Maybe that’s something that’s up your alley. You can get those done or maybe even in a theater room or something like that be good.

New Construction, Challenges, and Final Thoughts

Now, what about so this is all like retrofit after the fact. You’re putting in these lights. What do you do for new construction or let’s say someone’s putting in a new basement development and they want recess lighting? Is there any special prep work that you have to do for these recessed lights or what do you do? there’s a few different ways to do it. You can get these brackets that you screw into the joist and then that way when the drywallers go, they can cut out the holes for you. We found a lot of guys will miss them when we’re drywalling or when we’ve wired it and they come in after and drywall. So, what we’ve started doing is we’ll run all the wires, put the boxes in for the pot lights, screw them to the truss or the joist or wherever we end up putting lights in. And then after drywall, we’ll come in and cut all the holes in. So, we draw a map of the basement or upstairs, wherever we’re putting them, and we have all of our measurements written for all the pot lights. We’ll come in and drill all the holes after, put all the pot lights in, and that way we know when none of them get missed. Yeah. So, we found that’s the easiest way to do it.

The most consistent least amount of frustration for yourself. Yeah, because you know drywallers, they often like to cover up receptacles, switches, recess lights, they like to cover that stuff up. yeah, but you know, we love drywallers. except when we don’t when they fill our boxes with mud. Love that. I don’t know how many wires. What’s that? They routed the wires. Yeah, router them off. So you only have like an inch left to work with. Love when that happens. That’s why we were smart. We always leave lots of extra outside the box. We can pull it through and restrip it, right? We left our map of pot lights at a house one time. The drywallers cut all the pot lights in, but they had it flipped around so they’re all like completely wrong. Northeast, southwest. Yeah. Oh, another thing to put on the map, right? Yeah. We drew a door as the exit to the basement as a walk out. So that’s the door and they thought it was the window on the other side of the basement. So it flipped around. Dang it. So close. So close. They tried. They tried. They tried. Well, good for them. Well, said bad for them cuz they had to patch all those holes. Yeah, they’re mad at us for it. That’s funny. Okay, but anyways, that’s life and that’s what happens.

So recessed lighting, it’s really cool. Everybody should have more recess lighting in their homes. you have an old home especially you know usually there is room for one light in each room in the center of the room typically and you know if you want some more light you want more variety more options want it brighter talk to Ryan he’ll come in he’ll lighten up your life and and make your make your home a lot brighter and more homelier to be in especially living rooms can be especially dark right a lot of older houses have no lights in the living room That’s right. Not even the ceiling, just a flat ceiling, switched plug, and that’s it. So, you can have one lamp on a switch.

So, get Ryan in. I know there’s lots of houses in Lacombe, Blackfalds, Red Deer, Sylvan Lake, all of those areas that could use an update, an upgrade with some lovely new recessed lights. So, give them a call. He’ll be happy to come out. Check out LumenTek and just click the call and you’ll get Ryan on the phone and he’ll come out and give you a quote. Thanks so much for joining us. We’ll catch you on the next one.