Two Rooms in One Room, Six Nights a Week
A hotel-attached restaurant in Turin: 62 covers, a 6-metre bar, three lit surfaces — counter kickplate, back-bar bottle shelves, perimeter ceiling cove. Existing downlights stayed for table service, so the scope was the decorative layer only. The operator’s brief was one sentence: warm white for service, colour for the evening, no second console at the pass.
Two of the three product calls in this hotel restaurant bar rgb led strip package are right. What fails is the promise that one device switches all three surfaces together.
A Three-Channel Controller Cannot Find a Fourth Wire
The 44-key IR unit named for this job is an RGB controller: three output channels. Two of the three zones here are RGBW, which is four. There is no fourth channel for the white die, and no four-channel decoder in our catalogue — our eight controllers are single-colour RF, IR and touch dimmers plus three-channel RGB.
The honest answer is better than the one asked for. Put the colour channels on the RGB controller and the white channel on its own single-colour dimmer. Service white and evening colour are two duties on two timescales; separating them means the white level survives whatever happens to the colour scene, and the bar holds 3000K while the cove cycles.
What none of them do is remember. No scene presets, no PIN lock, no timeclock, no 21:00 switch — and an IR receiver needs line of sight, which a ceiling void does not give it. Two locked scenes recalled from the pass is a control system — the integrator’s line item. Our supply also stops at DC12V adapters topping out at 96 W, so 24V drivers are bought locally. The brief’s driver placement is the best thing in it and needs no change: a ventilated void above the beverage store, heat away from the spirit shelves, every channel serviceable without dismantling the bar.
The RGBW Call Was Right, For a Reason Worth Writing Down
Choosing RGBW over plain RGB wherever a surface also has to read as warm white is the strongest decision on this project, and the reasoning matters more than the outcome. White mixed from red, green and blue is three narrow spectral peaks: no CCT to bin against, nothing to hold reel to reel, and poor rendering of food and skin, because rendering is judged against a broad-spectrum reference at the same CCT and a three-peak mix has none. A guest walking in from a 3000K corridor reads it as wrong immediately.
RGBW carries a real white die, binned like any white strip — which is why it holds the corridor’s colour temperature during service and still goes saturated at 21:00 without a second fixture.
Two corrections to how the brief argued it. TM-30 is an IES method, not a CIE one, and its Rf and Rg describe broad-spectrum sources rather than set targets for a mix. And nothing was tuned: we run no spectral measurement service, so the white channel is what its bin says. On the pure-RGB zone a CRI figure describes a mixed white that surface never runs. Platform detail sits on the RGB COB LED strip page.
What Went In Across Three Surfaces
Approx. 70 metres, three sightlines.
| Surface | Model | Spec | Approx. Length | Why this SKU |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A — bar counter kickplate | the highest-density reference in the range | RGB COB · 840 LEDs/m · 10 mm · 24V · IP20 · no white channel | Approx. 14 m | Seen from below a seated eye line at close range, so a continuous emitter with no dot pattern; this surface is only ever colour. |
| B — back-bar bottle shelves | ES-COB-784-12MM-24V-RGBW | RGBW COB · 784 LEDs/m · 12 mm · 24V · IP20 · CRI 90 white channel | Approx. 22 m across six shelves | Read at arm’s length through glass, where a real white die does the service scene and colour does the evening one. |
| C — perimeter ceiling cove | ES-5050-96-24V-RGBW | SMD 5050 RGBW · 96 LEDs/m · 12 mm · 24V · IP20 · CRI 80 white channel | Approx. 34 m | At Approx. 3 m behind an opal diffuser nothing is judged and no dots resolve, so density buys nothing here. |
| Control and power | 24V drivers, profiles and diffusers, the IR receiver position and any scene-recall system all contractor-supplied to our schedule · our part is one three-channel RGB controller plus one single-colour dimmer per white circuit, with no presets and no schedule · bar LED lighting notes cover the layout | |||
The kickplate feed is the one to get right, and the brief had the symptom backwards. Drop on an RGB run does shift colour, but toward red: red dies have the lowest forward voltage, so their channel keeps more current as the bus sags while green and blue fade faster. A deep amber scene goes redder along the run, not oranger. Inject at mid-span past Approx. 10 m — 840 LEDs/m at 10 mm is a dense load — and reels cap at 20 m, so the 22 m shelf run and the 34 m cove are multi-section by definition.
One detail worth copying exactly: the shelves were built off-site, so a metre of the actual reference went to the joiner and the routed channel came back at 12.5 mm rather than a guessed 10 mm. No timber reworked on site. Every circuit sits in the SELV band of IEC 61140, and all three references are IP20 under IEC 60529 — a real constraint behind a bar, where the kickplate gets mopped.
If You’re Refitting a Hotel Bar
- Count channels before you count devices. An RGBW surface needs four; the white belongs on its own dimmer anyway.
- Use a real white die wherever white is a scene. RGB white has no CCT to match a corridor with — see the same logic in our guest-room notes.
- Inject mid-span on colour runs. Drop pulls an RGB mix toward red, so uniformity fails as a hue error, not a brightness one.
- Buy scene recall as a control system. A remote with no memory cannot hold a house scene through a service.
Refitting a comparable hotel restaurant bar rgb led strip scheme? Send us the bar and back-bar drawings with the shelf sections and we’ll return a per-surface cut-and-feed schedule with the channel count and control boundary marked.
About Senfey
Senfey is a Chinese LED strip manufacturer founded in 2010, running a Shenzhen factory of roughly 12,000 m² with monthly output above 250,000 meters. Our catalog covers COB, SMD, LED Neon Flex, addressable strips and controllers. See Senfey’s entertainment venue hub for bar and restaurant references.
