The whole ceiling moves from 2700K to 6500K on a schedule you set. Warm and low in the evening, cool and bright at midday, with no visible fixture doing it.
A tunable white ceiling is a translucent stretch membrane over a field of dual-channel LED tape. The tape carries warm diodes and cool diodes on the same run, and the controller mixes the two, so the ceiling holds any color temperature between 2700K and 6500K across the tunable range. RGBW is available where a project wants color on top of white. Everything above the membrane is 24V low voltage, from the driver to the last diode. We fabricate the frames and weld the membrane to size in our own Dania Beach shop, bend the profiles on our own CNC, and install across Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach.
A fixture lights a spot. This lights the plane. That difference is what a tunable ceiling gives you that a tunable downlight layout does not: the light comes off the whole plane instead of a handful of small bright apertures, and there is no fixture grid fighting the sprinklers, diffusers and structure, because the light is not on a grid at all. Drops, diffusers and access still get coordinated. That work moves into the cavity and into the membrane penetrations instead of onto the reflected ceiling plan. The third difference is that changing the character of the room later is a schedule edit, not a re-lamp. You are not buying forty fixtures that each need to agree with each other. You are buying one surface that is already in agreement with itself.
One thing to be plain about before you read any further, because the word circadian gets used loosely in this industry. This page describes what the ceiling does, which is hold a color temperature anywhere from 2700K to 6500K and move between settings on a schedule you approve. It does not describe what that does to anybody. We are a fabricator and an installer, not a research lab. We make no claim about health, sleep, alertness, mood or productivity, we hold no clinical or physiological study of any kind, and we are not certified to the WELL Building Standard or to any other wellness standard. If your project is pursuing a wellness credit, that is your consultant’s call and it will require documentation we do not hold. Everything below is about the equipment and the schedule.
The same surface reads like late afternoon at 6pm and like open sky at noon. Nothing on the ceiling changes physically. The mix between the warm and cool diode channels changes, and the room follows it.
Nobody has to touch a switch for the room to behave. Scenes and times are programmed at commissioning, fades run long enough that people do not catch them moving, and manual override expires back to the schedule on its own.
We bend the perimeter on our CNC in-house, so a curve, an oval, a stepped island or a wall panel gets the same tunable field as a rectangle. One drawing set, one crew, Florida lead times.
The rooms that ask for this most often in South Florida are the ones that run all day on one ceiling.
Corporate offices and conference rooms with no exterior glass, where the same interior room has to work at 8am and at 7pm without anybody rewiring it.
Medical, dental and clinical treatment rooms, where the room runs from the first appointment to the last and nobody wants it looking identical at 8am and 6pm.
Training rooms, classrooms and showrooms, including our own CeilEx training center in Dania Beach, which runs a multi-phase daily schedule you can come and stand under.
Hotel lobbies, spa and treatment rooms, and restaurants that run from lunch into late service on one ceiling instead of on two lighting layers.
The assembly goes in this order, and the order matters because the membrane is always last.
We laser the finished ceiling height, pick up the real structure, and confirm the cavity you actually have rather than the one on the drawing. Cavity depth is the single number that decides how the finished ceiling looks, so it gets settled before anything is ordered.
Extruded aluminum 6063 track, white powder-coat or mill finish, fastened to structure or to blocking. Which profile depends on the edge condition. AP-301, AP-302 and AP-302-W are the cove profiles for a perimeter halo or a floating edge. AP-212 and AP-213 are the Luminous Form profiles when the tunable field is a shape rather than a full plane; AP-213 comes in 13 ft 1-1/2 in (4000 mm) stock with 8 in and 4-1/2 in profile heights and bends into U, C and O forms, and multiple lengths combine for large architectural outlines. AP-305, AP-306 and AP-307 are the Linear Light Mini, Midi and Maxi profiles when a recessed line runs through the field. AP-216 handles floating shapes. Most profiles ship in 6.5 ft stock. Curves are bent on our CNC before they leave the shop, not kerfed on site.
Everything the light will see gets finished flat white. Unpainted plywood, gray board and bare structure all pull light out of the cavity and show up later as a dull patch on the membrane. Obstructions get relocated or boxed. Nothing crosses the cavity within 4 in of the membrane plane.
Dual-channel tunable tape, warm and cool diodes on one tape, mounted in aluminum channel and fixed to a substrate or hung on a strut grid at the pitch the cavity depth calls for. Runs, feed points and injection points are laid out on the shop drawing before anyone opens a reel. Tape for a given room is ordered from a single production lot. Where a room is bigger than one lot, we bin the lots and lay them out so the change never lands in the middle of a sightline.
24V constant voltage. Both channels home-run to the driver location, every run tagged to the shop drawing, injection points made per the run-length rule in the design guidance below. From the driver to the last diode this is all low voltage.
Constant-voltage 24V drivers, two channels per zone, sitting in an accessible location: a closet, above a cabinet, behind a hinged access panel. The 0-10V, DALI-2 or DMX gear sits with them. Drivers never live above the membrane. One limit to put on the drawings early: the cavity above the membrane is not a return-air plenum. We hold no UL 2043 rating and no plenum assembly test data, so on the evidence we have this assembly is not permitted in a return-air plenum. Where the ceiling sits in a plenum condition, that gets settled with the mechanical engineer and the authority having jurisdiction before anyone specifies it. This is the constraint that most often changes an architectural decision, which is why we raise it in design development and not during construction administration.
Both channels run at 100% and get walked, looking for dead segments, mismatched runs and anything casting a shadow line. Fixing this with the ceiling open takes minutes. Fixing it later takes a de-tension.
Translucent PVC, matte or satin, welded to size, harpoon edge, heated and tensioned into the track. Nominal 8 mil, 7 to 10 mil depending on finish. Where a project wants fabric instead, CLIPSO knit polyester with PU coating, around 230 g/m2, goes in cold and dry as a clip-in and runs seamless to 16 ft 8 in (5.1 m). Printed translucent membrane is an option here too, since a printed graphic can still be backlit.
Scenes named, times set, fade rates set, override behavior set, and the client walked through it once with the actual controller they will use.
These are shop standards, taken from what we have built and what we have had to fix. They are field-derived working numbers, not laboratory data.
Measured from the LED plane to the underside of the membrane. Shop standard is 8 in minimum for tunable white and 10 to 12 in preferred for a full open field. A fixed-CCT field will live at 6 in, but tunable needs the extra 2 in because the warm and cool diodes sit in separate rows on the tape. In a shallow cavity the eye picks that up as faint warm and cool banding, most visible at a low angle from the far side of the room. If you only remember one number from this page, make it 8 in.
Keep pitch at or below cavity depth. Shop default is 6 in pitch at 8 in depth, opening to 8 to 10 in pitch at 10 to 12 in depth. Push pitch wider than depth and you get stripes on the membrane. Not sometimes. Every time.
120 LED/m minimum behind an open field. In any shallow cavity, which means the linear slots (AP-305, AP-306, AP-307) and the return in a cove profile, use COB tape or 240+ LED/m or you will read individual dots through the diffuser. Slot depth varies by profile, so work from the drawing for the run you are actually using.
Hold the last run 3 to 4 in off the track in an 8 to 10 in cavity. Tight against the track burns a bright line at the edge. Too far back leaves a dark border that reads as a dirty ceiling.
Our membrane transmission is 42.0% diffused, measured at Poznan University of Technology by the method in CIE 130-1998. That is a test report, not a certificate, and it is the only transmission number we will quote. Design the LED field knowing that more than half of what you generate stays in the cavity. Do not use the transparent figure (70.5%) for a backlit ceiling; transparent does not hide the diodes.
And when somebody proposes a second diffusing layer to rescue a shallow cavity, understand what it costs. Our 42.0% is for one membrane. We hold no test data for two layers stacked, and in the field a second diffuser takes out far more light than people expect. Opening the cavity 2 in is the better trade.
24V constant voltage. Shop standard is 16 ft maximum end-fed per run, center-feed for a 32 ft run, and power injection every 16 ft beyond that. Tunable tape is carrying two channels on one run, so we treat 16 ft as a hard limit rather than a target. Voltage drop on a long unassisted run shows up as a warm, dim tail at the far end, and on a continuous luminous plane that is obvious.
Size drivers at 80% of rated output with both channels at 100%, even though a real schedule almost never gets there. Commissioning does. For access, shop standard is a minimum 12 x 12 in clear opening, drivers within 25 ft of the farthest strip, and an accessible location that a facilities person can reach with a step ladder. A stretch membrane can be de-tensioned, dropped and re-stretched by an installer, and that is a genuine advantage over drywall, but it is not an access panel and nobody should design as if it were.
One zone per 200 to 250 sq ft of luminous field, or one per room function, whichever comes first. On 0-10V that is two dimming pairs per zone, one per channel, so four control conductors. On DALI-2, one DT8 tunable-color address per zone, and the bus is polarity free, which makes it the easier retrofit in an existing building. On DMX, two channels per zone for tunable white and four for RGBW, which is the right choice when the ceiling has to follow an AV or show control system. Casambi-type wireless where a project specifies it.
Specify drivers their manufacturer rates for PWM dimming at 3 kHz or higher. We have not measured flicker ourselves, so where a room is critical for camera work we put the actual driver on a mockup and let you shoot it. Ask early whether the room gets photographed or filmed, because showrooms, training rooms, conference rooms with video calls and anything near a video wall all change which driver we put on the schedule.
Fades of 20 to 45 minutes between daytime states. Anything faster and people watch the ceiling instead of ignoring it, which defeats the point. Give manual override an expiry so the room returns to schedule on its own, at the next scheduled event or after a set hold.
Our own training center ceiling in Dania Beach runs a multi-phase daily schedule behind translucent membrane. It is our test bed, on our own controller, and the phases nobody notices are the slow ones. Come stand under it before you commit to a schedule shape.
A welded seam in translucent PVC reads as a faint line under backlight. Run seams along the long axis of the room and land them over a strip run rather than between two. Where a project cannot tolerate a visible seam at all, CLIPSO fabric runs seamless to 16 ft 8 in.
Pitch wider than cavity depth. A dark or unpainted cavity. Something crossing the cavity within 4 in of the membrane, usually a sprinkler drop or a hanger. Mixed tape lots in one room. All four are decisions made at the drawing stage. None of them are field fixes.
For any field over roughly 200 sq ft, build one. We put up a 4 x 4 ft cavity at the actual depth and actual pitch with your actual finish membrane, and you look at it before anything is committed. It is cheaper than being wrong at 2000 sq ft, and it is the honest substitute for photometric files we do not hold.
While we are being plain about evidence, here is the whole list. We hold one measured membrane light-transmission report from Poznan University of Technology, method per CIE 130-1998. We hold ASTM E84 surface burning data per finish, on white specimens, to which the laboratory assigned no classification. We hold manufacturer ratings on the strips and drivers we specify.
What we do not hold, named precisely so you can check it against your spec section: no LM-79, LM-80 or TM-21 data and no IES files for the finished assembly, no goniophotometric testing of any kind, no CRI tested by us, no ASTM C423 or NRC acoustic data, no NFPA 701, no NFPA 286 and no NFPA 265, no ASTM E2573 mounted-assembly test, no UL 2043 rating, and no Florida Product Approval or Miami-Dade NOA for this assembly. On the tunable side specifically: no clinical or physiological study and no WELL credit documentation. Anything we do hold, we will send you the report for. Anything we do not, we will tell you and put a mockup up instead.
Interior rooms with no exterior glass, where the same room has to work at 8am and at 7pm and holding one flat setting for fourteen hours is what everybody is trying to get away from.
The same room runs from the first appointment to the last, and nobody wants it looking identical at 8am and 6pm. This is an appearance decision on our side, not a clinical one.
Including our own CeilEx training center in Dania Beach, which is the ceiling we test schedules on before we recommend one to anybody else.
Hotel lobbies, spa and treatment rooms, and restaurants that run from lunch into late service on one ceiling instead of switching between two lighting layers.
Primary baths, media rooms, closets and any interior room with no window, where the ceiling is the only thing that can tell you what time it is.
Here we specify strips their manufacturer rates CRI 90+ and drivers rated for high-frequency dimming, and we will put a mockup in front of your actual camera before you commit. We do not test CRI or flicker ourselves, which is exactly why the mockup exists.
No, and we will not hand you numbers we did not measure. We hold no LM-79, no LM-80, no TM-21, no goniophotometric testing and no IES files for this assembly.
What we do hold is the membrane light-transmission test report (42.0% diffused, method per CIE 130-1998, Poznan University of Technology) and the manufacturer data for whatever strip is specified. If the project needs calculated levels, your lighting designer can model the LED field as the source and apply the transmission figure, or we build a mockup at the real cavity depth and pitch and you meter it on site. Most of our projects go the mockup route, and it settles the argument faster than a calculation does.
Four things. Cavity depth from the LED plane to the finished ceiling. Driver location with a note that it is accessible. Zone boundaries. Control protocol, meaning 0-10V, DALI-2 or DMX.
Give us those four and we take the rest, including the strip layout, feed points, injection points and profile schedule, onto our shop drawings. If the cavity is tight or the driver location is not resolved, flag it in design development. Both of those are cheap to solve on paper and expensive to solve on site.
We do not make health claims and we do not certify to any wellness standard. We are a fabricator and installer, not a research lab. We hold no clinical or physiological study, and we hold no WELL credit documentation.
What we build is a ceiling whose color temperature and brightness follow a schedule you approve, so the room is set warm and low in the evening and cool and bright at midday instead of holding one flat setting for fourteen hours. That is a description of the equipment and the schedule, and it is as far as we will go. If your project is pursuing a wellness credit, that is your consultant’s call and it will require documentation we do not hold.
You watch it move if the fade is too fast. Our shop standard is 20 to 45 minute fades between daytime states, which is slow enough that people register the room as having changed without catching it changing. Fast transitions get used for scene recalls, like switching a conference room to a presentation state, where you want people to notice.
The membrane comes down. We de-tension it with heat, drop it, repair the run, and re-stretch the same membrane back into the same track, usually in one visit. No drywall damage, no patching, no repaint. This is one of the practical reasons a stretch system beats a hard ceiling with recessed fixtures once you put a hundred feet of LED tape above it.
Not on the data we hold. Our ASTM E84 results are membrane only, per finish, on white specimens, the specimens were not mounted per ASTM E2573, and the laboratory assigned no classification. Plenum use needs testing we do not have, and we hold no UL 2043 rating.
Tell us in design development if the ceiling cavity is a return plenum and we will work with the mechanical engineer on a ducted return instead. This is the single constraint that most often changes an architectural decision on these ceilings, so it is worth raising early.
Ask and it goes out, usually within one business day. The profile cross-sections and the wider set live in the lighting downloads library.
These are the documents a specifier asks for that we cannot hand over today. They stay listed and empty on purpose. If any one of them is a project requirement, tell us early and we will say plainly whether we can get it or whether the project needs a different material.
A panel manufacturer sells tiles, panels and modules that you lay out on a grid, so the ceiling arrives as a field of joints and module lines you have to design around. We bend the perimeter on our own CNC in Dania Beach and stretch one continuous tunable surface into whatever outline the architect actually drew, on walls as well as ceilings, printed if you want it printed, with one drawing set, one crew and a full-size mockup before anyone commits. If you are still deciding which lit ceiling this project wants, the lighting systems overview lays the options side by side.
Profile cross-sections, dimensions and the full color chart live in the technical library. CAD files are sent on request, usually within one business day.
View system
Give us the ceiling outline, the cavity depth you have and the control protocol you want, and we come back with a build approach, a budget and a lead time. Where the depth is tight or the room gets filmed, we put up a mockup at the real depth and the real pitch and you look at it before anything is committed.
Share a few details and our team will follow up within one business day.
