LED skirting board or LED strip

In conversation, everything is called an “LED strip light”. Three different things hide behind that one word. Until you separate them, the comparison means nothing.

The bare strip

A flexible tape, a few millimetres thick, with LEDs in a row and adhesive on the back. You cut it at the printed marks, you stick it where you want, you connect it to a power supply. It is the freest solution and the cheapest. Nothing protects it, nothing holds it straight, nothing carries its heat away. It is not made to be looked at head-on.

The generic aluminium profile

A U-shaped bar, sold in short lengths, into which the strip is laid and onto which a diffuser is clipped. It solves two problems at once: it diffuses the light and it takes care of heat dissipation. But it adds itself to the wall, it replaces nothing. Under a cabinet or at the back of a cove, it is perfect. At the bottom of a wall, it ends up sitting above the existing skirting board — and that shows.

The LED skirting board

A profile that is also the skirting board. It takes the place of the old one and goes round the room with its internal corners, its external corners, its end caps and its connectors. The channel for the strip is drawn into the section, at the right depth, behind a diffuser cover. This is no longer a lighting accessory placed in a room: it is part of the room, which happens to give light.

The confusion is expensive. Someone buys a reel and a DIY-shop profile expecting the result of the interior photographs, then discovers that the essential part was missing: a cove, or a skirting board. The strip was never the subject. What surrounds it decides everything.

This is the first difference, and the hardest to put right afterwards. A strip needs to be hidden. So the question is not “which strip”, but “inside what”.

The cove: a fine solution, and a real building job

A lit cove is a recess built on purpose: a plasterboard drop, a suspended ceiling, a rebate at the top of the wall. The result is superb, because the source disappears completely into the fabric of the building. The price to pay is a building job: framing, board, jointing tape, filler, sanding, paint. Dust throughout the room, several days, and a trade — plasterer or joiner. That gets decided when you are redoing a room, not on a Sunday.

Coving: less work, more bulk

Plaster or polystyrene coving is glued to the top of the wall and acts as a cove. It is quicker and cheaper than a built-up plasterboard drop. In exchange, you add a substantial volume at the top of the room. In a period interior, it converses with the mouldings. In a contemporary interior, it almost always clashes.

The skirting board: you replace, you do not add

An illuminated skirting board occupies a place that already existed. You take off the old skirting board, you fit the new one. The work stops at the bottom of the wall: no ceiling to make good, no joint to fill, no repainting the whole room. And above all, nothing has been added on. The eye does not go looking for where the light comes from, because all it sees is a skirting board.

This is where the surface-mounted generic profile shows its limit. Fitted at the bottom of a wall, it leaves two horizontal lines a few centimetres apart: the original skirting board, then the aluminium bar. In daylight, switched off, the eye reads a bodged job. Evening light does not undo what daylight has shown.

A simple test: if you are redoing the floors or the skirting boards anyway, an illuminated skirting board costs almost no extra work — the removal was already on the list. If the floor stays put and the room is finished, this is the moment to make an honest comparison with a cove.

Two installations can use exactly the same strip and not produce the same light. What changes is what sits between the LEDs and the eye.

The dotted effect

A bare strip looked at directly is not a line, it is a string of beads. You can make out each LED, with a darker dip between two of them. At a few metres it fades away, but the eye stays sensitive to repetition: it reads that before it reads the mood. On a wall, a dotted line is noticed immediately, above all in a reflection — window glass, television screen, shiny floor.

What a diffuser does

An opaque diffuser cover mixes the beams and turns the dots into a continuous line. To do that it needs room: a certain distance between the strip and the diffuser. That is exactly what a deep channel gives. A diffuser sitting right on top of the LEDs does not diffuse much, it brightens a grid of dots. A great many disappointments come from there, and not from the strip.

Let us also say what it costs: an opaque diffuser absorbs part of the light. The same strip gives a little less behind a cover than bare. That is the price of uniformity, and for ambient lighting it is an exchange well worth making. To light a worktop it is the other way round — there you are after luminous flux, not a picture.

Never seeing the source

A cove that is not deep enough, or badly proportioned coving, lets you see the strip from the sofa. The bright point draws the eye and destroys the indirect effect in a second. A skirting board solves that by construction: the slot faces the floor, the wall, or the room through the diffuser, and the source stays enclosed whatever angle you look from.

The breaks in the line

Every cut, every corner, every strip joint creates a dark gap. On an improvised installation, those gaps fall wherever they happen to fall. On a skirting run planned with dedicated corner pieces, they fall in the corners, where the eye is not looking for them. The detail seems minor on paper; it is nevertheless what makes the difference between a line and a series of segments.

The strip on its own

On paper, it is five minutes. In practice, four things trip people up.

• The surface. The strip’s adhesive holds on a smooth, clean, dry surface. On matt paint, on textured render, on powdery plaster, it lets go — not straight away, a few months later, and starting in the middle.
• The corners. A strip only bends one way. To turn a room corner flat, you have to cut it and carry on with a connector, or solder it. That is where amateur installations give way first.
• The supply. The strip runs on extra-low voltage. It needs a transformer, somewhere to put it, and a connection point. It is not difficult; it is simply rarely planned for in the right place.
• The length. A strip can only be cut at the marks provided, and a segment that is too long loses brightness at the far end of the run. On a long run, the supply is thought out from two points, not one.

The generic profile

It adds one step and removes several. The strip is held, protected and diffused. What remains is the cuts, the end caps, and the alignment of two bars end to end — a badly adjusted profile joint shows up against the light. Sold in short lengths, they multiply the joints on a long run.

The skirting board

The work shifts: less improvising, more preparing. The usual order comes down to five moves.

1. 1.Take off the old skirting board and clean the foot of the wall.
2. 2.Bring the extra-low-voltage supply to the start of the run, before fixing anything.
3. 3.Offer up all the lengths dry, with no glue and no screws, to check the mitre cuts.
4. 4.Cut at 45° in the corners, at 90° for straight joints, then deburr.
5. 5.Seat the strip right to the bottom of the channel, then clip on the diffuser cover.

None of this is difficult, but none of it can be improvised either. A skirting run is drawn before it is ordered: linear metres, internal corners, external corners, position of the transformer. In Switzerland, connection to 230 V is a job for the electrician whichever solution you settle on — that constraint does not depend on the choice between strip and skirting board.

An LED does not blow like a bulb. It weakens. It slowly loses light, and sometimes drifts in colour. What speeds up that ageing is heat.

A strip gives off little heat, but continuously and along its whole length. Stuck onto plaster, wood or plastic, it heats against a material that holds the heat. It stays right against the LEDs. In an aluminium profile, that same heat spreads through the mass of the metal and leaves through the whole surface of the profile. That is the technical reason, not the aesthetic one, why a serious LED profile is made of metal — and why an aluminium skirting board and a generic aluminium profile are equal on this particular point.

Anodised 6063 aluminium adds something else: anodising is not a paint laid on the surface, it is a conversion of the aluminium itself. It does not flake and it does not yellow. White PVC, on the other hand, yellows under ultraviolet light — first near the glazing, then everywhere. The plastic of a cheap diffuser does the same: white light turns slightly cream, without anyone being able to say when it started.

One last point, the one everyone forgets: the adhesive. A strip’s adhesive ages, dries out and comes away. In a profile, a strip that has come unstuck is still held by the channel and nobody notices. On a bare wall, it hangs. And a strip that hangs is not something you stick back — you replace it.

Here is the question to ask before buying, and the one almost nobody asks: in ten years’ time, how do you change that strip?

In a plasterboard cove, the answer is unpleasant. It takes a ladder, peeling off a strip whose adhesive has gone hard, scraping the residue out of a narrow recess without damaging the plaster, sticking the new one down at arm’s length, and often redoing the paint. A three-hour job that takes a day. On glued coving it is sometimes worse: the coving gets damaged before the strip does.

In a profile, generic or integrated, the answer is simple. You unclip the cover, pull out the old strip, lay a new one in the channel, clip the cover back on. The profile does not move, the wall does not move, the paint does not move. An LED skirting board is made to last far longer than the strip it houses, and that is precisely the point of it.

Day to day, the difference is smaller but real. The bottom of a wall collects dust, vacuum-cleaner marks and the odd kick. A diffuser wipes clean with a cloth; an aluminium profile takes a brush going past without marking. A bare strip cannot really be cleaned: dust settles between the LEDs and ends up showing in grazing light.

One remark that holds for all three solutions: the part that will fail first is neither the strip nor the profile, it is the transformer. It needs a ventilated, accessible place — a cupboard, a low unit, an access hatch. Never shut inside a partition.

There are situations where fitting an illuminated skirting board would be money spent for nothing. We may as well name them.

• Under a kitchen cabinet. The carcass already forms a natural cove: the source is hidden by construction, you are lighting a worktop, and you are after output rather than a beautiful line. A strip in a small aluminium profile is plenty.
• In an alcove, a shelf, a bookcase. The lengths are short, the light is seen at an angle, nobody looks at the source head-on.
• Behind a television or a mirror. The object itself masks the strip and throws the light onto the wall. Nothing to hide, nothing to build.
• In rented accommodation. You do not take off someone else’s skirting boards. A strip comes away without leaving a trace, or near enough.
• When the cove already exists. A suspended ceiling with a rebate, coving already in place: the hard part is done, the strip only has to slide in.
• When the budget is tight and the use temporary. A strip and a power supply remain the cheapest way to have indirect light this evening.

In several of these cases, the right compromise is not even the bare strip: it is the strip inside a generic aluminium profile. It costs little more, it dissipates the heat, it gives the continuous line and it makes replacement easy. We say so readily to customers who ring us about a kitchen: it is not our product you need.

The skirting board comes into its own elsewhere, and for precise reasons. When the light has to run over a long linear stretch at the bottom of the walls. When it is there to help you move around at night — corridor, staircase, entrance hall. When the room is finished and you refuse to open up a ceiling. When the existing skirting boards are coming off anyway. And when you want the installation to look as though it had always been there, rather than added afterwards.

A summary of the above, without flattery. No column wins everywhere.

A quick way to settle it: ask yourself whether the light has to run along the bottom of the wall all the way round the room. If it does, the skirting board is the only object made for that. If it does not, there is a good chance that a strip in a profile will do, and nobody will hold it against you for saying so.