Are walls deep enough for light fittings
My wisdom this Wednesday comes as usual from over 15 years’ experience as a Lighting Consultant – not necessarily by making the mistakes myself in all cases! When specifying floor washers to be installed in walls ensure that the walls are deep enough to accommodate the fittings. A standard blockwork wall with a plaster skim on both sides is going to be not much deeper than 110mm so a 95mm deep fitting that will need electrical connection space will not be the most sensible choice and a shallower fitting will need to be specified. However, if it’s going to be battened out, plaster boarded and plaster skimmed they should be fine. In some cases, it may be worth talking to a structural engineer to check that you aren’t compromising structural integrity of the wall itself by having lots of holes cut into it! Note that fittings with integral drivers tend to be deeper but the shallower fittings without the built-in drivers will need planning ahead so that the driver can go in a place it can be serviced and not so far away that it creates voltage drop (the effect of this being the further away from the drivers the lights are, the dimmer they are).
