Lighting installation in Batumi: groups and scenes for your apartment

Where lighting starts: the furniture and the ceiling

We plan lighting installation in Batumi apartments before the rough electrics, because the cables in the walls and the fixings in the ceiling depend on it. We need the furniture layout, the type of ceiling in each room and an idea of how you spend your evenings. A light over the dining table that gets moved half a metre after plastering means cutting a new chase.

In each room we lay the lighting out in layers: general lighting, task lighting over the worktop and the mirror, accent lighting in recesses and on walls, and night lighting by the bed and in the hallway. The type of ceiling decides which of them can be built in. What changes with the choice between stretch film and plasterboard is covered in the comparison of stretch and plasterboard ceilings.

Groups and scenes

A group is a set of light fittings on one switch or one channel. A scene is made up of several groups: in the evening the recess lighting and wall lights are on, for cleaning all the downlights, and at night only the floor lighting in the hallway. You don’t need an app for this: two or three switches by the entrance and a two-way switch by the bed are enough.

We run a separate cable to each group and bring a neutral into every switch box, even if there is an ordinary switch there for now. An ordinary switch can then be swapped for a smart one later without chasing the wall; there is more on this on the page about a smart home in your apartment. In a rental apartment we add a switch by the front door that turns everything off at once, as described in the section on renovating apartments for short-term rental.

Downlights, tracks and strips

We cut the hole for a downlight in plasterboard with a hole saw before the final skim coat, and fit the light itself after painting. In a stretch ceiling, a mounting platform is fixed in advance for each downlight. We don’t put downlights tight against a floor-to-ceiling wardrobe or a curtain rail: the light hits the door or the curtain and falls on it as a bright patch.

A track is fed from a single point, and we choose where it goes on the plan, usually by a wall, so that the cable doesn’t cross the whole ceiling. A magnetic track runs at low voltage and needs its own power supply, which we price as a separate item.

We fit LED strip in an aluminium profile with a diffuser and never stick it straight onto the skim coat. A long run is split into sections or fed from both ends, otherwise the light gets dimmer towards the far end. How a recess for concealed lighting is built and which strip goes into it is described on the page about multi-level ceilings.

Power supplies and drivers: where we hide them

An LED strip power supply or a downlight driver fails more often than the LEDs themselves. So we put each one where it can be replaced without redoing the finishes: behind an access hatch in a boxing, in a wardrobe, above the door of an overhead cupboard. We choose a power supply rated 20–30 % higher than the strip draws: run at its limit, it heats up and fails sooner.

We place the power supply close to the strip. At 12 or 24 V, the current in the wire for the same power is 10–20 times higher than at 220 V, and a long, thin wire eats up some of the light. We mark every location on the diagram and photograph it for the handover file. When we take over lighting done by someone else, this is what we find most often:

• a power supply sealed into plasterboard with no access hatch;
• strip stuck straight onto the skim coat, with no profile;
• light fittings in different shades of white in the same room;
• a dimmer that doesn’t match the driver, so the light flickers or hums at low brightness.

Order of work

Lighting runs through the whole renovation. At the rough stage we pull cables to the groups, fit switch boxes with a neutral, and leave cable with spare length at the recesses and the power supply locations. At the ceiling stage we fit platforms for the stretch film and cut holes and hatches in the plasterboard. Profiles with strip, downlights, tracks and chandeliers go in after the final coat of paint.

The last step is switching on every group and scene. We check for flicker at the dimmer’s minimum brightness with a phone camera: the eye doesn’t always notice it, but on the screen it shows up as stripes.

How much lighting installation in Batumi costs

Fitting a downlight costs from 38 to 54 ₾ per light. That is the labour: the hole in the plasterboard, connection and fitting, while the light fitting itself, the track, the strip and the power supply are priced separately, according to the chosen model. LED strip installation costs 34–38 ₾ per linear metre for the labour, a lighting track 27–30 ₾ per metre, fitting a power supply 30–36 ₾, and a chandelier 51–60 ₾.

The price goes up with stretch ceilings with a shadow gap profile, which costs 42–54 ₾ per linear metre, with many groups on two-way switches, and with new outlets: the labour for each new point, whether a switch or an outlet for a light, costs 42–66 ₾. The final cost is set after the lighting plan and once the estimate is agreed.