Thursday, March 26, 2009

Bathroom Ceiling

One our customers recently refurbished his bathroom ceiling with Blanca Ultra White ceiling panels. He sent in some photos with the following note.

"Just to let you know, the delivery arrived as stated and all was in good condition. Finally got around to fitting the ceiling panels over the last couple of days and was amazed at how easy they were to work with and how smart they look. Went for a floating effect with remote controlled RGB LED backlighting, also added some speakers."


click the image to enlarge

I sked him how he achieved the effect and this is his description of the work he carried out.

"Hi Mark,It's pretty simple really; the ceiling was battened with 34mm timbers leaving an 8cm gap (5cm perspex around the edge, plus 3cm overhang for the trim to clip onto the panel edges) between the timbers and the walls. RGB LED tape such as this:

http://www.litewave.co.uk/rgb_led_tape_home.asp

was stuck around the perimeter of the battens. The tape is then wired back to my in-wall airing cupboard and connected to this controller (in an IP56 rated enclosure, just to be safe)

http://www.led-tech.de/en/LED-Controlling/LED-Controlling/MultiLine-RGB-Controller-V2.0-LT-1001_118_31.html

This is powered by an old 12v laptop power supply capable of providing 5amp (as required by the 8m of LED strip I used) To go with the controller I also use an IR extender which is mounted in the hollow edge of a ceiling panel with an aligning hole drilled in the edging trim to receive commands from the remote which allows mixing of around 16 million colours, all of which can be dimmed in 100 step increments.:

http://www.led-tech.de/en/LED-Controlling/LED-Controlling/MultiLine-IR-sensor-LT-1003_118_31.htmlhttp://www.led-tech.de/en/LED-Controlling/LED-Controlling/MultiLine-IR-Remote-Control-LT-1002_118_31.html

I left a 5cm gap around the edge of the ceiling panels to allow the light from the LED's to show, to diffuse the light and give a soft glow I used strips of 050 white opal perspex (this just looks like an extension of the edging strip when the LED's are off), this all had a bead of silicon sealant added to the edge during fitting to ensure the LED's were sealed away from any steam.The in-ceiling speakers are just bog-standard QED systemline 0.5's (suitable for bathroom use!) which are powered by a sonic impact t-amp with the audio source being a logitech squeezebox (outside the bathroom using an RF remote to control) to stream music from my music server. I use these all over the house (lounge, bedrooms, kitchen, study) and can listen to independent music in each room, or synchronise every player or specific players around the house. All-in-all it took me about 2 and a half days by myself to complete and turned out better than I planned (half a day of this was testing by a qualified electrician as any new electrical work in a bathroom falls under part P of the building regs).

Video of one of the many colour change sequences here: http://tehjunk.com/bathroom.MPG"


The following image shows how the bathroom ceiling looked before the work was carried out: