How to Plan Under-Cabinet LED Strip Lighting in a Kitchen
Good under-cabinet LED strip lighting turns the counter below your wall cabinets into a bright, even work surface without a glare bulb in your eyes. Plan it as task lighting: mount a continuous strip near the front underside of the cabinet, aim the light down at the counter rather than out at the room, and hide the strip in a channel so you see a clean line of light instead of the diodes. Do that and chopping, reading a recipe, and cleaning up all get easier.
That is the short version. The rest of this guide covers what strip to choose, where exactly to place it, why a channel and diffuser matter, and where the driver goes so the whole thing looks built in.
Why under-cabinet LED strip lighting works better than a single fixture
A counter lit by one puck or one bulb ends up with bright spots and shadows, and your own hands cast the worst of them. A continuous strip spreads light along the full run of cabinet, so the counter reads evenly from end to end. Because the strip sits under the cabinet, the source stays out of sight while the light does the work below.
For a kitchen, the detail that sells the look is a dot-free line. A COB (chip-on-board) strip carries its diodes in a continuous phosphor line rather than as spaced points, so through a diffuser it reads as one smooth band instead of a row of dots. Whether COB or another format is right depends on the light output you want, viewing distance, the depth of your channel, the diffuser, LED density, and your voltage and control options, so judge it per product rather than by a rule of thumb.
