Wireless Picture Light, No Batteries Either - CleverLite

A typical frustrating situation: You buy some nice posters or paintings and you can’t show them off as much as you’d like to because you don’t have picture lights on your wall – or wires in the wall to connect any. Recent technology offers battery-operated LED picture lights – the cordless solution to your problem, you’d think. But did you know that these can cost you $30 or more per year in batteries? Not so with this CleverLite, which is cordless and battery-less at the same time.

Why It’s Clever

As probably so many of you, I didn’t have the money for nice things on my walls when I was building my house. It was as if a black hole was sucking in all my money. Hence, picture lights and wiring for them were not high on my list of priorities. Since then, we have bought a few affordable but nice things, and now they’re hanging in the shadows at night.

I’ve been considering battery-operated LED picture lights, but they do have many drawbacks. First of all, they eat batteries, costing you a lot more than the investment in the picture light itself, making them anything but green. You could use rechargeable batteries, but you’d still need to open up the fixture every three weeks to replace them. Secondly, your piece of “art” needs a frame that’s large and stable enough to attach the fixture – and you can only illuminate one large frame, while I like to group several little frames on my walls. Last but not least, standard picture lights don’t help a lot if you want to have an accent light for something that’s not on the wall, for instance a sculpture.

Enter this cordless picture light called CleverLite. It’s not a light in itself, but it makes use of a beamsplitter to redirect part of the beam from an existing downlight toward any place you want to illuminate. You do need a recessed downlight, but then the CleverLite fixture simply attaches to the rim of just about any downlight fixture without the need for screws or connecting wires. Because it redirects only part of the beam, the downlight still retains its original function, so in fact you are just adding a light beam to your interior. And because your eyes work like that, the spot that was originally lit by the lamp doesn’t even seem that much dimmer.

Not a video this time, but almost as good, the following picture shows you the difference with and without a CleverLite attached to a downlight (it doesn't blink like that of course, one pic is with and one without the splitter - you knew that, didn't you).

You can use it as a cordless picture light, but you can just as well apply it to bring some extra light into the interior of a closet. Or to illuminate a nice piece of furniture.

Summary

Wireless picture light, doesn’t use batteries either
Alternative to battery-operated LED picture lights
Attaches to almost any existing downlight, without screws
Installs in 30 seconds
Accent light for groups of frames, sculpture, furniture, display shelves, wardrobes, etc
No separate switch or dimmer required
Saves batteries and hence money.