My TT Lighting Issue

So, we just purchased a travel trailer and we love it. One thing about it, though, that we weren't terribly fond of is the quality of the built-in lighting. It consists of what's called “pancake” lights on the ceiling. These lights are dual-sided and quite bright. Having a lot of indirect lighting in my house, it made the transition fairly jarring. We tried various tricks with the lens' on the lights - using various things to try to block some light, using lower wattage bulbs, etc., but ultimately none of that worked.

What we needed was some alternative lighting that we could use when the bright direct lights weren't needed. So, thinking about this, it occurred to me that a solution that we used in the kitchen of our house might work well in the TT as well. We installed rope lights clipped up under the kick plate in the kitchen. This creates some very nice indirect lighting around the floor of the kitchen.

I looked around the trailer and found the perfect place to put the rope lights. We have one slideout on our trailer - where the dining room table and couch are. For those of you who don't know what a slideout is, it's a section of the trailer that slides out of the side of the trailer when parked - this creates a lot more space inside when using the trailer. When you travel, you just slide it in.

The frame around the slideout has some trim around it, which created just enough space to lay the rope lights behind. In fact, there's a groove between the slideout and the inside of the trailer that the rope can tuck right in to. This creates very pleasant indirect light inside the living area of the trailer without being too bright/glaring. Perfect for watching TV or just sitting around chatting. I don't have the rope lights attached in any way - so when I get ready to tear down I just roll the lights up and when I set up I just unroll the lights and put them up. It's just a couple of minutes work so it's not a huge deal.

The only other problem I had was that there wasn't an outlet where I needed it - but fortunately there is power under the dining room table and I needed the plug on the backside of one of the dining room booth seats. So I just ran wire inside the walls under the booth seats (which lift up to allow for storage) and added a plug on the backside, right where I needed it.

I added a Z-Wave lamp module so I could remotely control the light and adjust brightness and it worked out perfectly (see my post about building an alarm system for my TT for another cool project I did.). If you have any questions about this little project feel free to post over on the rv.net forums on the topic I created about this. There are also some pictures over there though it's hard to capture pictures of indirect lighting.