Monorail Lighting System: Putting Together A Plan That Works

Builders are often the ones who install a monorail lighting system for you, but there may come a time when you want to put one in for yourself. You will need to make some choices about what components you want and how you want to put them together.

Your decisions will be based on what you want to light. If you do not know, take a lighting inventory of your house. At night, turn on all the lights and walk around the house. Stand or sit in all your usual places and note the ones that seem too dark.

Decide On The Type Of Lighting

Once you have figured out where the lighting should go, it is time to decide whether you need ambient light, task light, or both. Ambient light sheds a broad, diffuse light across a broad area. Task light will shine a concentrated light on a particular spot.

Next, you will take some time to think out where the heads or pendants should be placed. Where will they have to be to shine the most light where you need it? Figure out how several lights can be put together on each monorail to achieve this.

Choose your fixtures with an eye to design and to function. You want the fixtures to be attractive. You may want to put specially made glass pendants, or even functional art on your monorails. Consider them in terms of whether they will provide ambient or task lighting.

You can plan for the shapes of your monorails by putting them on graph paper. Measure your room and draw in the main features on the graph paper. You will be using one square to equal one foot or a similar scale. Be sure to draw in the details that will affect your monorail.

Sketching Out Your Plan

When you have your room mapped out, draw in your monorail in light pencil. That way, you can try different shapes for the rail. Remember that some monorail lighting systems can be easily shaped by hand, while others come in a variety of interesting shapes. With your sketch, you can play with different ideas and come up with the one that suits you best.

From your diagram and the research you will do on monorail lighting systems, you should be able to determine how much monorail you will need. It is important to know how many systems you will have and how many sections you will have in each system.

The Importance Of A Junction Box

One thing you also need to remember when planning your monorail system is that it has to run directly under a junction box. Without a junction box, your system cannot get power, or you will end up drawing power from a remote junction box which is unsafe.

The junction box has to be equipped with a surface transformer. You can buy these from most companies that sell monorail lighting systems. The function of the transformer is to step down the voltage, because monorails are low voltage systems.

All of your planning will be worth it if you have taken your time to design the monorail lighting system that suits you. It will have the fixtures you like and the configuration you need. It only takes a short time to put it all together.