i installed xenon UC lights but not the pucks - I used the tracks. I love the UC lights - they are awesome. They not only look great - they provide needed light for the DW when she is doing food prep and cooking. She loves them. I remember discussing the pucks with my lighting designer. He felt that the light spread with the tracks was better, so I went with his suggestion. You also have to consider the design of the wall cabinet bottoms and trim - weill they hide the pucks? You don't want to see the fixtures when standing back from the cabinets. I also have Insteon dimmers and controllers. Love em! But ther are some things you need to be very careful with when using with LV lighting. Even though the web site says they can be used to dim magnetic transformers used to power low voltage lights (see Smarthome.com website) I would not do so! I did a ton of research on this and actually talked to the designers of both the Insteon dimmers as well as the low voltage transformers and they told me that the Insteon dimmers do not have the protection circuits required to prevent trace amounts of DC from hitting the transformers. If any DC is applied to a transformer - and that depends on how clean your main power is - it will burn out. The high quality low volatge dimmer switches (see Lutron) have special circuits to protect against this - Insteon does not. So I used an Insteon remote switch (non dimming) to remotely turn on and off the UC lights. I found that we don't need to dim these lights - since we use them for doing work and not ambience. Make sure that you carefully plan out your wiring for the LV lights. I had 4 sepereate feeds of LV wire running to each of the cabinet sgements. each of these feeds are about the same length. If you use one long feed, you might wind up with different light output for the lights that are furthest away from the transformer. Also - make sure you use high quality stranded wire specifically designed for LV lighting applications. Best lof luck with the pucks.

I agree--11 is just a kid. My baby will be 21 on her next b'day, and she's a purebred (they sometimes have shorter lifespans) anyway, if she's fine during the day, and does this only at night? It would seem she's crying out for attention. She doesn't like that you're 'ignoring' her (I'm not criticizing, of course you have to sleep). I really think it's a psychological problem if it's only at night and often on things she knows you care about. They're pretty smart that way. My cousins once had a cat who would ALWAYS pee in an open suitcase--he knew they meant someone was going away. I guess, the only real answer is to confine the cat to a small area that's easily cleaned, overnight. Not a great solution, of course. Otherwise, I have to admit, mine just went through a spurt of peeing on the floor, by the litterbox. She was pretty consistant, so putting half a plastic tablecloth down there, seems to have at least protected the floor. She does have arthritis. But I don't think that was the problem. I just noticed she's got some wicked knots on her back legs--have been working on them little by little for the past several days--and she's back to using the pan. I suspect the knots were pulling her skin uncomfortably and making it hard to get in and out. I have NO idea how she so quickly developed such wads, but perhaps you want to check your cat? I've also considered putting a 2 by 4 along the outside of the box (under the plastic tablecloth, of course), to make a step for her--but at the moment, don't think that will be necessary. Hope you find an answer that works for you. Of course, the hairballs are an ongoing problem with long-haired cats. I find feeding a hairball forumula food and frequent grooming does help, but certainly doesn't eliminate the problem.

I have some of those, but a different brand. I think I bought them at Walmart in a 3-pack a couple years ago. Realizing that they're not the same brand - the ones that we have really don't put out much light at all. I have one in the master bathroom for the middle of the night trips when I don't want to turn on the regular bathroom light and be blinded (kind of like a night light). It's fine for that - but it really would NOT be sufficient for lighting up the counter. Since you say that 90% of what you want it for is really ambient lighting - not work light - that might be fine for you, but the 10% you need it for work light, I do not think it would be effective at all if it's basically the same as the ones that I have. Why don't you just buy 1, and try it out to see if it would work for you? I understand about the undercabinet lighting thing being expensive. Our entire undercabinet deal (lights and plugmold) turned out to be WAY more expensive and detailed than we planned on. Good luck.

"They aren't designed to be enclosed ..." Pegasus lighting sells small 60 W AC-DC power supplies that are designed to be installed inside boxes. About $15 each. If raping near the lights (and not near the power supplies or transformers) makes them light up it is not likely a supply problem. The lights are probably just poorly made. They need to tolerate the very high temperatures of halogen bulbs while still providing solid low impedance connections at low voltage. The temperature swings are room to many hundreds of degrees. There is a real reason the typical bi-pin base used is a ceramic block. You may need to find out exactly what brand the lights are. The only ones I have had bad experiences with have been 120 V pucks including short bulb life, bulbs welding to contacts, and generally poor quality. Al l the LV ones i have (and have installed for others) are from Pegasus lighting and have been fine. And to top it all of the idiot PO used the zip cord from the pucks inside walls through a tile back-splash and put the lights on the countertop circuits with 120 V snap switches in the back-splash. At least one row of 3 lights had wire nuts on the zip-cord inside the wall. I need to go through from the other side of the wall to access the wring and pull a new branch circuit to fix this (already done on one section), two more to go.