Bathroom Nightlight With Red LED Lights

For this project I wanted to add a red nightlight with its own on/off switch in my bathroom, to be easier on my eyes when I need to get up in the middle of the night! Originally, I got an outlet plug-in red nightlight which was supposed to be motion and light sensing. It came in a pack of two and unfortunately both seemed to be a bit defective. I also realized that even if they had worked properly the red light was shining straight out from the wall outlet directly into my eyes, and even though it was red I still found it a bit too intense for my preference. In this design I have the light shining downwards, affixed to the underside of my cabinet, which gives indirect light that I find isn't too bright when I'm in the room.

For the light I used LED light strips, which are great for DIY projects because they tend to come in long spools, and you can cut them to smaller lengths depending on what you need. I used RGB (red/green/blue) LEDs, which can produce a huge number of colors, and they came with a remote control and infrared receiver for controlling the lights. However, I didn't need all of this for a simple bathroom nightlight, so as you will see I only soldered the red channel on the light strip, and I didn't use the remote control. Instead, I added a devoted on/off switch into the circuit. So for your project you could make your own devoted red, or blue, or green light strip, or keep all three color channels and use the strip to its full potential!

As this example shows, I applied this to my bathroom, but you could easily adapt this project for any area or space that you might want. Other ways you could apply the ideas in this project might include:

• desk lighting,
• pantry or under-shelf kitchen lights,
• bed frame lighting,
• artistic accent lights on furniture,
• stair lights.

Difficulty

In terms of difficulty, you will (likely) need to do some soldering in this project. However, if you really don't want to solder (and/or don't have the equipment), they do make solderless LED light strip connectors which you can find on places like Amazon! If you decide to add the toggle on/off button in the way that I did, you will need to splice a couple of wires together. And you might also need to drill and saw wood (again, if you decide to do what I did here). If you are comfortable with these things then this project shouldn't be too hard. And if you are looking for a project to practice those skills on, then this might be a great way to boost your confidence!

Overview

For this project, we will:

• Cut and solder the LED light strips
• Create a mounting bracket for an on/off switch
• Splice an on/off switch into a power adapter cable
• Solder the adapter cable to the LED light strip
• Cable manage

Most of the materials and tools for this project I already had, many left-over bits from previous projects. Therefore the cost of this project was quite low for me, but of course it will vary depending on what you may or may not already have. This is what I used for the project:

Materials

• RGB LED strip light
• power adapter (this may come packaged with the LED light strip, so double check!)
• Input: 100-240V, 50-60Hz, 0.6A (alternating current)
• Output: 12V, 1.5A (direct current)
• on/off switch
• 22 gauge wire
• solder
• shrink tubing
• Some shrink tubing comes with an internal layer of applied glue. This creates a much stronger seal when applied to wiring, and is what I used in this particular project.
• electrical tape
• Cord channel (5', Legrand Cordmate, size/model C10)
• 1/2" plywood
• white paint
• "agreeable gray" paint
• glue dots
• This is just a double-sided adhesive that can be cut to any shape. See Step 6 for a picture of it!
• removable mounting putty
• tape

Tools

• soldering iron
• helping hands tool
• heat gun
• utility knife
• cutting pliers
• needle-nose pliers
• wire stripper
• scissors
• coping saw
• drill
• file

Your personal material list may vary and not necessarily include all of this. Depending on your own space and idea, you may want to use different materials and tools than what I used! Basically, the minimum you'll need are the LEDs, power adapter, and the soldering equipment (unless you opt for solderless connections!).

Power adapter planning

The first important part to figure out is how long of a cable you will need for your power adapter. In my case, I had a couple of spare power adapters from previous electronics which I salvaged, but each with a different length cord. I took them into my bathroom and figured out how I needed to route the cord around my sink to reach my cabinet when the adapter was plugged into the wall outlet. Make sure you have something long enough, and give yourself some extra wiggle room! One minor mistake I made was that I didn't give myself enough extra wire length, and in the end I had to pull it rather tight in a couple of spots. I got lucky and it worked out alright (barely!), so..... just keep that in mind!

Bear in mind, there are two ends to your power adapter - the end that plugs into the wall outlet, and the end that plugs into whatever electronic item it was designed for. The latter we don't really care about in this project because we are going to cut that end off to expose the inner wires directly!

Additionally, does the end that plug into the wall outlet have two or three prongs? If it has three prongs, then there should be three individual wires inside of the cable (one for ground, hot, and neutral). If it only has the two prongs, then you just have the neutral and hot wires. For our LED strips we only need two wires to solder to complete the circuit, so I went with a two prong adapter.

Finally - voltage and current! LEDs don't use much electricity, so make sure you are not using a power adapter rated with too high of an output voltage and/or output current compared to the input voltage/current of the LEDs. Often when you buy an LED light strip they come with a power adapter already, so you won't have to worry about this part. But in my case I had already used the original power adapter that came with my LED set, so I needed to look for one which matched the voltage and current requirements of my light strip (which were 12V, and 1.5A).

LED planning

Similarly, figure out how much LED light you will need for your space. Remember, LED light strips can be cut, but only in certain spots along the strip (the ones I had, for every three LEDs there was a cut line). My project required relatively little LED light (enough for the underside of one cabinet), but they will often come in long spools (mine was 16.4 ft/5m long). So I have more that I can use for other projects!

Additional planning

Decide where you want to put the on/off switch. You will need to make sure that the two cables of the on/off switch will be able to reach your power adapter cable, because you are going to splice them together.

Also decide if you want to cable manage your cables and try to hide/blend them into the surroundings. A while back I discovered cord channels at Home Depot, and now I have used them in several projects to conceal wires. If you do decide to get something like this as well, make sure to plan how much you will need for the length of wire that you will be using!

First, I arranged the LEDs in a rectangle on the bottom of my cabinet, and used tape to hold them in place. To get the corners of the rectangle I just twisted the LEDs into a small loop. Once I saw how they looked, I personally decided that I didn't want the loops, so I opted to cut the strip into smaller segments soldered the corners together instead. This added more unnecessary soldering to the project, but it was a personal preference - you can opt to do this or not!

The LED strip can be cut at specfic intervals, marked with a dashed line and a "scissors" symbol. You may also find that every so many of these intervals there will be a location where instead of the scissors symbol you can see that two previously unattached segments were soldered together. It is also fine to cut along these soldered points (as you may tell from the pictrues I included here where I cut along these spots). In fact, there is a side-benefit to doing this - a little less soldering that you have to do yourself! Since the solder has already been applied in these spots, it just saves you from having to apply at those locations.

At the corners of my rectangle I only needed to solder the "+12V" and "R" channels, since I only wanted the red light ("G" and "B" are the green and blue channels, respectively). I cut two small connecting wires from my 22 gauge wire spool, using the wire strippers to strip off the tips to expose the wire. I then carefully used pliers and my soldering iron to solder the connections. If you are only using one color channel, be careful not to accidentally apply any solder that crosses two channels together, otherwise you may get both colors turning on when you plug everything in! This is known as "short-circuiting" - when you "short" the circuit by making an additional unintended path for the electricity to flow. Worst case scenario: if you do accidentally short your circuit, it's not the end of the world! Carefully use your soldering iron to reheat the solder you applied, and use the iron tip to try and wipe the solder away so that it is no longer touching your two channels.

Finally, I applied electrical tape over the corner to keep the wires protected.

Additional Note: It's a good idea that each time you solder a new connection between your cut LED light strips, that you verify they still work and that your connection is good by plugging in everything and making sure the lights turn on! Jump down to Step 5 to see how to test this!

The on/off switch I was using was meant to be clipped into some kind of mounting bracket to hold it in place. I did not have one, so I decided to make one myself! Because I had planned to mount it later to the underside of my bathroom sink countertop, I knew it didn't need to be very large. I decided to make it out of 1/2" plywood, so this step is just to cut an appropriately sized hole and fit the button in.

I first started by drilling a 1/4" hole in a piece of scrap plywood which I cut to my desired dimensions. Then I widened the hole using a coping saw, until it was just about the right size that the on/off switch would fit in. Then did the fine tuning with sandpaper. The switch itself had two edges that were meant to compress and tightly hold the button in place once it had been inserted into its socket (see the pictures). In order to push the switch completely and as tightly into the hole I had cut as possible I used a file to cut cut notches that matched the profile of the switch.

Before pushing the switch into the hole, I painted the plywood with white paint to match the color of my bathroom cabinet, and to help seal the wood. I chose not to paint the two edges of the bracket which later would be fastened to the cabinet and the underside of the sink countertop. Last step was then to fix the button into the hole.

First off, we need to expose the internal wires of the power adapter cable so that later we can solder them directly to our LED light strip. In the picture you can see that this power adapter was originally intended for some other electronic device, as it had a specific adapter plug attached to the end of it. Using the cutting pliers in the photo, I cut along the marked yellow line to remove the end.

Next, decide where you want to place the on/off switch along the main cable - this is where we are going to do some splicing! Inside of the main black cable tube are two smaller parallel cables. Using the utility knife I carefully cut through the protective outer tubing case and separated these two cables - then I cut one of the two as shown in the pictures. Be extra careful at this step and do not cut both wires!

Now strip the ends of the exposed wire to prepare them for soldering. Also at this step, add any shrink tubing that you will want later to reinforce the segments that you are about to solder together (see pictures).

At any point during this project when you need to solder something, I highly recommend using a "helping hands" tool! They are extremely helpful for holding the wires you want to solder in place while you use your other hands to hold the iron and apply the solder. If you don't have one of these, then maybe ask a friend to help with this step.

When soldering the on/off switch into the circuit, it doesn't matter what end you solder to what end of the power adapter cable. The sole purpose of the on/off switch is to break or connect the circuit to the flow of electricity. Here the red and black wires in my pictures have no important meaning to the overall circuit!

Once the soldering is complete, slide the shrink tubing in place so it completely covers the solder and connects the wires. Using a heat gun, heat the shrink tubing until it shrinks down and forms a good seal on your wires. Since the shrink tubing I used had glue coating the inside of the tube, it formed a very tight seal and strengthened the connection.

Now we need to connect the power adapter cable to our LED light strip. Something very important to understand - the LED light strip may be polarized, meaning the electricity will only flow through the circuit in one direction. At the end of your power adapter cable, where you exposed the two internal wires, electricity will flow out of one of the wires, and return through the other wire. Determining which of these two needs to connect to the +12V and the R channel on the light strip is very easy. Plug in the power adapter to your wall outlet, make sure the newly added switch is in the "on" position, then touch one wire to the +12V channel and the other end to the R channel. If the lights turn on - that's the correct wiring! If they don't turn on, then simply reverse them and they should turn on!

If the lights don't come on either way - then you are going to have to troubleshoot! This is where a tool like a multimeter can come in really handy if you have one. Even if you don't, you need to go back through each part of the circuit where you cut and/or soldered something and make sure there isn't a bad connection.

Now solder the final two connections, remembering to first add on any shrink tubing before you apply the solder!

Now it is time to put everything in place! I strongly recommend that you plug the adapter into the wall outlet you will be using, and run the cable along your desired path before you adhere the LED light strip into place. But once you are ready, the LED strip will have an adhesive backing to it, so peal off the protective layer and carefully stick the lights to the desired surface!

I personally like to keep cables as hidden as possible, so I purchased a cord channel to hide some of the cable. The nice thing about white cord channels is that you can paint them to match the color of your wall, which helps them blend in better. And they can be cut to any length, so once I had things in place I measured and cut the cord channel to the appropriate lengths, painted them, then pealed the adhesive backing off of them and fixed them directly to my wall.

For the on/off switch, I wanted it out of plain sight, so I opted to attach it just underneath the back corner lip of my sink counter top. Originally I tried using hot glue, but for some reason the glue didn't adhere well to the surface of my cabinet. Then I tried "glue dots" and those worked well! The glue dots I applied to the two unpainted sides of the plywood mounting bracket.

Finally, I was able to route a long stretch of the cable in a small gap between my mirror and my sink counter top. To hold the cable in place, I used removable mounting putty. This has the benefit that it isn't permanently fixed into place, so I can easily remove it later if necessary. And it can be rolled up and fit into any shape gap.

Overall I was very pleased with how this project turned out. The LED lights put off just the right amount of light, and since they are mounted to the underside of the cabinet the indirect light is not harsh on my eyes. And crucially being red light it is much easier on my eyes in the middle of the night when I have just woken up, and doesn't ruin my night vision. The cables are well managed with the cord channels, which maintain a clean look to the design.

If you find inspiration from this design and either make it or adapt in in some other way, I'd love if you share it in the comments for the rest of us!