Plan Your Track Lighting Installation

Before you bone up on how to install track lighting, you first need to plan where you want the lights to go and what you want them to do. For the best accent lighting of an object on a wall, plan so that the light is at a 30-degree angle to the wall. This will prevent glare and minimize shadows. If you can handle a little math, try this: Let S be the distance from the track fixture to the wall being lit. Let D be the distance from the ceiling to the center of the object being lit. The track fixture location can be found with the equation S = D x 0.55. Avoid putting your track lighting installation down the center of the room -- it just causes glare, and you get inadequate light at the edges where most task lighting is needed.