The best under-cabinet lighting

Kitchen counters are unusual: there is a published illuminance target for them, and it is much higher than the room around it. General kitchen lighting is put at 20 to 50 footcandles; the prep and cooking surface at 50 to 100.

That gap is the entire argument for under-cabinet lighting. You cannot get a counter to 75 footcandles by making the ceiling brighter without lighting the whole kitchen like a warehouse - and the wall cabinets would shadow the counter anyway. A light under the cabinet is the only sane way to hit the number.

Three specs decide it, and price correlates with none of them reliably:

• CRI. The counter is where color judgment happens. 90 is the floor, 92 to 98 is available at ordinary prices, and there is no reason to accept 80 here.
• Switchable color temperature. A fixed 3000K bar is fine in a warm kitchen and wrong in a cool one. A five-setting bar covers both and lets you match whatever is in the rest of the room.
• Full-range dimming versus hi/low. Given the arithmetic above, you will frequently want less than full output. Two steps is not enough resolution.

Length matters too, and it is a measuring job rather than a spec: an 18-inch bar under a 15-inch cabinet section does not fit. Measure each cabinet run before ordering.

Mount the bar at the front edge of the cabinet underside, not the back. A light at the back throws its beam onto the backsplash and puts you and your hands between the source and the chopping board. At the front, the light lands where you work.

If the counter has a gloss or polished stone surface and you can see the fixture reflected in it, that reflection is glare and it will annoy you daily. Either move the bar forward, or switch format to a COB strip, whose continuous emitter reflects as a line rather than a row of dots.