Summary:
The lights are up! There is still some work to do with wiring and splicing before we will be ready to add power and control, but the LEDs themselves are now fully installed.
Details:
We took a few design chances this time around. In particular, the purgatory side of hell is bridged as a triple arch (see picture) rather than a single arch, and the bathroom side of hell is now bridged with a straight set of lights running across the far wall. As a result, we ended up with a much larger lighting shortfall (10m) than we had anticipated, but between Francesco, Brian, and myself we were able to make up the difference from personal supplies and the project now has a few meters of spare lights should repairs be needed in the future.
The strips are held to the ceiling with 1" strips of 3M outdoor double stick tape placed every 6 inches. What remains of the no-stick backing on the strips themselves was also removed, but it seems like strip adhesion is unlikely to be a significant factor in holding the strips to the ceiling (their adhesive is pretty bad). We ran a 2 month test with tape every 8 inches and got no hint of peeling, but if we run into issues during my time at Tech I will update this page. The process:
Installation:
One person was responsible for cutting strips of tape and placing them along the path of the lights. This took place over the course of 3 or so weeks with the last half being done today while the other groups worked. This probably does not need to be done beforehand.
One person was responsible for soldering together smaller strips into larger ones. This ended up not happening as fast as the other groups worked which meant some of the splicing had to be done on the ceiling. Not ideal, but actually pretty feasible. In future rounds, I would suggest this happen beforehand, even though it worked fine to do splicing concurrently.
Two groups of two people worked as teams to put up the lights themselves. It seems like the pattern that worked best was to have one person working ahead removing 2/3 tape backings in blocks of 16 or so. That let the second person roughly keep up while still being able to place the lights. It really helps if the people putting up the lights have long nails (or sharp knives) since the tape backing doesn't really want to come off.
The whole installation process took about 4.5 hours from start to finish with an average of 5 people working throughout.