Good advice Fred. Last night I was scouring the web to find the lux equivalent in LED wattage compared to a 20W Xenon bulb, and I held a bulb up inside the cabinet to get some idea how bright it might end up. When I placed one of these bulbs in the 39" wide upper cabinet, it appeared that one would not be bright enough when full power is desired, maybe two Xenon bulbs would do the trick. Then I figured each Xenon bulb's light power is roughly equivalent to 4W of LED. If I used the higher power LED strip I would use a shorter piece, only about 2 feet long. But that would defeat the purpose of the more even illumination with a full surround LED strip, so like you said the 0.9W would be much better, wrapped all the way around. By the way I always avoid blue looking lights, always go for the warmer 2700K temps. I am also seriously considering the EnvironmentalLights brand RGB + Warm White strip because I know my wife would go crazy about the ability to change mood colors along the 8 upper display cabinets, plus the ability to put it in Warm White mode for normal display. They claim a CRI of 90+ which is hard to believe. These are listed as 3W/ft. which means that it should be less than that with only the Warm White LEDs turned on. I wonder if these would be decent. http://www.environmentallights.com/led-rope-and-strip-lights/led-strip-lights/rgb-colorplus-led-strip-lights/14318-rgbww-reel-12.html

Oh, Brickwood Builders—I thought of one other question on the daisy chaining of the lights and wiring that I wanted to ask you. So they drilled the hole for the drivers on the right side of that far left-most cabinet. This isn't ideal given that the LED tape and chaining needs to run left to right. And unfortunately there isn't enough slack left in the conduit to pull the drivers to the left-hand side of the cabinet. So, I think there are two options: 1) Run the initial wire down the back right inside of that cabinet, come out at the bottom right corner, and then run wire right-to-left along the rear rail, then back-to-front along the left stile, and begin the LED run there 2) Deal with that on the inside of the cabinet—so run the wire right-to-left along the top of it, and then down Which way would you vote? Is there another option I'm not considering? Thanks again so much for all your input, both here and in my carpentry thread!

Hello Pity - no, we haven't actually asked about it, and it might turn out that it's not a big deal after all. But it is right under the upstairs neighbour's kitchen so piping seems likely. Flo Mangan - that is an intriguing AND inexpensive idea! I like it! Will give that some pondering... In any case, you guys have all convinced me LEDs aren't the way to go! Thanks for saving us a lot of hassle :)

LED lighting uses a transformer. Usually they are in a simple plug form with a small box either attached to the plug or downstream from it. Hardwiring would mean you want it wired in like a ceiling fixture which is not what you want here. Add an outlet where you want it hardwired and plug it in from there. The led light do last forever but in the cheap kits you see the part that fails is the transformer and you want to be able to simply unplug and replace.