The Good: An affordable, all in one kit. Very easy to set up in minutes. Includes everything you should need. Motion sensor includes an ambient light sensor.
The Bad: Easy to trip the motion sensor while sleeping. No dimmer on the lights. Adhesive backing on LEDs easily releases.
Overall: There are few times when $24 can make such a big impact on your day to day life. If you live in a household where no one ever seems to sleep through the whole night without getting up, this is a huge upgrade for a small price. For most applications, the lack of wifi or color changing will go unnoticed.
Usually I classify accent lighting as a want, not a need. Things like under cabinet lights, under sofa lights, and television bias lights, are all cool and add to the ambiance of a room, but they’re rarely more functional than a standard lamp or overhead lighting.
I started considering under bed lighting the first time my wife was pregnant. For one reason or other, she would wake up at least twice a night and stumble around the room with her cell phone flashlight before finding her way to whatever door she was trying to use. Later, when we had our daughter, at least one of us had to get up four or more times a night. Still, we stuck with the stumbling flashlight routine.
When I found out my wife was pregnant again, I immediately ordered these under bed motion activated LED lights. Our lives, our sleep and our safety were instantly improved. Now whenever one of us needs to get up, enter, or leave the room at night, the lights instantly come on with a soft glow that rarely disturbs the person still sleeping.
The first thing you’ll notice if you start shopping out under bed LED lighting is that there are easily a million solutions available. They range in price from $12 to $200 and either come in kits or separate pieces. The LED strips vary in length (and can be cut if need be), some come with motion detectors, some do not. Some of the motion detectors sense ambient light, some don’t. Some only include enough for one side of the bed, some will work for both sides. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on the kit that I bought, which includes two motion sensors with ambient light detection, two four foot LED strips and one power supply with a Y adapter. I highly encourage you to shop around and find the kit that best suits your needs.
Why buy standalone a kit?
This is a perfect example of a product that is automated, but not smart. Would I like every single light in my house to be connected to wifi so I can control it with an app or voice? Sure. Do I need it? Nope. My bedroom is not a showpiece. It’s well kept and I like sleeping in there, but I don’t need fancy color changing, wifi, voice activated lighting under my bed to show off to anyone. What I need is a light that automatically turns on when I wake up at 4 AM having to pee and want to find my way to the bathroom without waking my wife when I fall over my sneakers. I also wanted independent lights on both sides of the bed. Finally, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money. This kit checks all of those boxes.
The setup
Setting up an under bed lighting kit is incredibly simple. The LED lights came on spools with adhesive backing. The motion sensors are meant to be mounted on the headboard legs (or the legs of the bed where your head would be if you dont have a headboard) and come with two double sided adhesive pads. The power adapter cord was long enough to run from the outlet next to my bed all the way to the center of the bed, where it splits to two adapters which can each reach out to the ends of a king size bed.
First, I made sure the power cable would reach everywhere I needed it to reach. The limitation here was the placement of my outlet, not the length of the cord that came with the kit. If it didn’t reach, an extension cord or power strip would easily solve the problem.
Next, I cleaned the areas that I planned to mount the motion sensors and LED lights. The underside of your bed is incredibly dusty, and it is highly likely that the adhesive will eventually give way, even with clean mounting surfaces. Even the kit recommends using additional tape on the ends of the LED strips to keep them in place. Once the area was clean, I mounted my LED lights and motion sensors.
A quick word on mounting your LED lights. There was no dimmer on my kit, so the lights will always come on at full brightness. Depending on your needs, you may want your lights brighter or dimmer. An easy fix to this is to mount the lights further in or out of your bed if possible. It’s best to test this in a very dark situation before affixing them to the bed.
Third, I adjusted the timer on the motion sensors. In my case, I chose 30 seconds, the shortest duration. It takes no more than 10 seconds to walk across my bedroom, and if you’re moving, the timer keeps resetting to 30 seconds.
Finally, I connected the power cable to the motion sensors, and the motion sensors to the LED lights. All in all, even with testing where I wanted to mount the lights, and having to push my bed away from the wall, this took about fifteen minutes.
Conclusion
In the months since I installed this kit, we have noticed that both my wife and I sleep significantly better. There is rarely a night that one of us doesn’t wake up and get out of bed, but we rarely wake the other now. An unexpected convenience is that I now never bother turning on the lights when I have to just run into my bedroom to grab something. The lights come in when I walk in the room and provide more than enough light to find what I need. We haven’t figured out how to stop accidentally tripping the motion sensor when we’re sleeping, but we’ve gotten used to it and it doesn’t often wake us up. This is one of those little, cheap ideas that makes a big impact over time!
