June 14, 2013

Dollhouse Lighting

I've decided to ignore that little voice that says "Don't make more work for yourself, just do the fancy electrical work in the NEXT dollhouse."

I don't know that there will BE a next dollhouse.  I have two.  They take up a lot of room.  Sometimes I hate having to put all the same rooms in every house.  My next house will more likely be a roombox.  My opportunity to get complicated is RIGHT NOW.  And right now I want to be able to separately turn on and off the lights in each room.

I have a vague idea of how the system works.  Cir-Kit Concepts makes a miniature slide switch that allows you to disrupt the power flowing past the point you install it.  All's I need to do is run the wires in the right places and make sure they don't go beyond that room.

First I had to determine where those places were.  The instructions all tell you to draw lines, but I came up with a fancier idea.


Those are little post-it strips that I found in the Dollar Tree.  I got them to be all organized in college, but only used a small amount.  In my plotting, the blue strips indicate a light fixture, the orange a switch, and the green the tape wire.  

There are a few areas where I don't yet know where I will have lighting, but I have been able to plot how to get the wire through the switch.  These areas will likely have floor/table lamps, so it should be pretty easy to run them around, or perhaps hide an extra switch if necessary.  

My next decision will be whether to use adapters to make it easy to switch out fixtures, or just hardwire them into the tapewire.  I also need to conduct more research on whether there are LED lights that can be used on this 12 volt tape wire system.  I THINK the answer is yes, and I just need to determine what exactly I need to buy and how to do it.  

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