A magnetic track system is not a light fitting you buy — it is a piece of ceiling infrastructure you commit to early. Most of what goes wrong goes wrong before anything is switched on.
A continuous channel carries 48 V DC. Luminaires clip anywhere along it, held and powered magnetically, and can be moved, swapped or added later without touching the wiring. That is the whole proposition: a lighting layout that stays editable after handover.
Against a conventional 240 V three-circuit track, the differences that matter are that the heads are smaller and sit flush with the channel, and that everything downstream of the supply is extra-low voltage. Against fixed downlights, the difference is that you are not committing to positions at ceiling-build time — only to the line the channel runs along.
Why 48 V. International safety practice treats extra-low voltage as up to 50 V AC or 120 V DC ripple-free (IEC 61140, IEC 60364-4-41). At 48 V DC the track sits comfortably inside that, which is why an exposed magnetic channel is acceptable where an exposed 240 V conductor would not be.
The channel comes in three forms, and they are not interchangeable after the fact.
| Channel | Commit by | Reads as |
|---|---|---|
| Recessed | Before the ceiling is boarded — it needs a continuous slot and a rebate | A line of light in an unbroken ceiling. The cleanest, and the least forgiving |
| Surface | Before final paint; fixes to a finished soffit | A visible black or white line. Retrofittable |
| Suspended | Before the ceiling is boarded — needs fixing points and a power route | A floating line at a chosen height. Good over tall volumes |
Recessed is the one that catches people. It needs a slot detailed into the ceiling before boarding. Deciding on recessed track after the ceiling is up means cutting it open again — the single most expensive mistake on these projects.
Add up the wattage of every head you intend to hang on a run, then leave headroom — both for the supply’s own comfort and because the point of magnetic track is that someone will add heads later. A run sized exactly to today’s layout is a run that cannot grow.
Enlighten Pro supplies on-track 48 V power supplies at 100 W, 200 W and 300 W, which sit in the channel itself rather than in a remote enclosure.
Voltage drop is the low-voltage tax. Power lost along a conductor rises with current, and at 48 V a given wattage draws roughly five times the current it would at 240 V. A long run at low voltage therefore loses proportionally far more than the same run at mains voltage.
What you see at the far end is dimmer, and sometimes slightly warmer, light. The fix is not a bigger supply — it is feeding a long ceiling from more than one point rather than pushing everything from one end.
| Option | What it needs | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| TRIAC / phase-cut | Nothing extra — works with a conventional wall dimmer | Homes, small retail, one dimmed zone |
| 0–10 V | A separate control pair to each driver | Simple commercial dimming |
| DALI-2 | A control pair, plus commissioning by someone who does it for a living | Offices, hotels, anything with scenes or BMS integration |
| Bluetooth / RF mesh | No control wiring; an app and a gateway | Retrofit, and projects with no commissioning budget |
On DALI there is one distinction worth getting right. DT6 is single-channel dimming. DT8 carries dimming and colour temperature on one address, which is what tunable white needs. A DT8 head on a DT6-only controller will dim perfectly and never tune — it fails silently, which is the worst way for a project to discover it.
The DALI bus is not extra-low voltage. The 48 V track is SELV; the DALI control pair is not. Inside control gear it is separated from the mains by basic insulation only, so it must be wired and treated as mains-voltage cable — and isolating “the lighting circuit” is not enough, because a fault in any one luminaire on the line can raise the pair to mains potential. Every circuit feeding gear on that line has to be isolated.
Our DALI wiring guide covers this properly, and the installation guide covers the channel itself.
It is a good system, and it is not the right system for every ceiling.
Send us the reflected ceiling plan and we will size the supplies and the feeds with you.