A case study in how to plan and install LED ‘Stars’ across your ceiling.

On this job we used a combination of LED Starfield fibre-optic lights and miniature LED downlights across a ceiling in a high-specification townhouse on the North Shore, Auckland.

The brief was to create a genuine looking array of LED ‘stars’ across a set of nine black acoustic panels mounted on a ceiling in a multi-level living space.

1/ Planning

To ensure a genuinely ‘random’ placement of stars we plotted a map of stars across the nine ceiling panels (This would allow the creation of an authentic spread of constellations if you have the patience to plot them all).

Some of the brighter stars were highlighted as locations for brighter light sources (Circled in green on the diagram)

2/ Luminaire selection

Two layers of stars were required here; The majority of the stars were created with fibre optic LED, with the brighter stars created by installing miniature LED downlights.

The fibre-optic light product selected (Starfield fibre-optic lights) is cool white in colour, has a radius or coverage of around 2.5 metres, and features several ‘twinkle’ settings to add movement and depth to the installation.  This was complimented with the smallest available recessed 1.2w LED in a warmer 3000k colour temperature, with a black rim to blend into the ceiling.

     

 

3/ Installation

The fibre optic strands were inserted from the ceiling cavity behind into tiny hole drilled through the black acoustic panels. Some holes accommodated multiple strands to create stars of different brightnesses. (Excess length can be trimmed off by clipping the protruding ends of the fibres). The miniature recessed LEDs were inserted from the front into small 20mm holes, and wired to shared LED drivers housed behind the ceiling panels.

The Starfield LED kit we used features multiple ‘twinkle’ settings – A slowly evolving brightness worked best, for a calming night sky effect.

! Care must be taken not to kink the LED fibres as this can impact on the transmission of light to the end of the strands.