The past couple of days I have been trying to find answers the what I thought were pretty simple questions.
I would like to have a 20 meters long LED strip in my house. I quite quickly found that most LED strips are sold in 5 meters long strips and that it is not recommended to connect them in strips longer than 10 meters - fine.
When it comes to the LED strips alone I got a bit stuck on how many watts per meter they use. One supplier stated that for a 12V 10.8W/m strip it is 15W/m for a 10cm strip, 11W/m for 1m strip and 6W for a 5m strip. I could not find such information for any other LED strip but this is very important because I would either need 280W for 20m of a 14W/m strip or only about 50% of that. Does anyone know anything about this? I would normally assume that if it says 14W/m it is 14W/m no matter how many meters I have as long as I have proper power supply.
My second question is about the LED controller. I am looking for something that I can connect to HA locally. For example Gledopto GL-C-006P or GL-C-006. When I check the manufacturer’s website, both of those controllers have 4 outputs CW, V+, WW, V+ (2nd one). On the manufacturer’s website, I can see that it is either 5A (GL-C-006P) or 6A (GL-C-006) per channel and total of 10A or 16A respectively. However, every reseller I found has those with a bit different spec, it only states that it is a total of 5A max even though it still has 4 pins for outputs. For example here (I live in europe but just to keep the page in english): Amazon US Gledopto GL-C-006P
For comparison, on Gledopto’s website it states 5A/channel, 10A max: Gledopto GL-C-006P
My question is: can I connect two 10m long CCT LED strips to this controller and control their white color and intensity separately? All CCT LED strips I found have 3 wires, WW, CW and 12/24V. I understand that I would connect 2xWW and 2xCW to the corresponding outputs on the controller and then 12/24V wire from one strip to 1 V+ output and then the 12/24V strip from the second strip to the second V+ output on the controller. Does this make sense?
Maybe I am going down a wrong path? I suppose that buying 2 power supplies and 2 controllers would be simpler but if one powerful enough power supply and one controller can do the same job, it would be easier for me.
Could you recommend any other setup?
My plan was to get a 150W 24V power supply and the gledopto controller together with 4 strips 5m each of a 24V CCT LED strips at 6W/m (for now, most of the LED strips I found were 14W/m) or something like that.
I would really appreciate some guidance, also with specific solutions that you use. I need 20m in total but it can be 2x10m and it has to be CCT LED strip but it can be pretty dim. I would just prefer at least 60 LEDs per meter.
Normally the power usage will decrease as longer the strip is due to the internal voltage drop. What humans normally do then is a power injection. For you project of a 20m long LED strip you surely want to avoid 12V and go directly with 24V as it allows longer continuous runs of strips - still power injection might be necessary (injecting in the beginning, the end and might one in the middle of the 20 meters).
What I found out is that the power consumption sellers claim are often a little higher then the reality (maybe they use this 10cm strip for testing as it has little resistance possible ).
I’m only aware of solutions running ESPhome or WLED which allow full ownership including local control, check @Quindor site as it is full of useful bits and bytes
It’s normal to have a total maximum output and extra ones per channel. Still the over all total maximum should obviously never be exceeded.
I would probably go down the road and choose a esp based device just to have piece of mind. Beside the QuinLED hardware (which is top notch btw.) you can also choose other solutions like the athom stuff
As a example: FCOB CCT LED Light Strip 640 LEDs High Density Flexible FOB COB 10mm Led Lights RA90 2700K to 6000K Linear Dimmable DC12V DC24V from BTF-LIGHTNING https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001614814078.html
Hi! Thank you for a great reply! I read up more as well and I followed almost all of your suggestions. For now, to start with, I decided to go with one of the gledopto zigbee controllers but I have more LED setups in mind and I will surely look closer at the quinled’s offer. I think that the main problem would be shipment cost + the taxes + import fees which are quite high for me in Sweden when buying from the US.
For the long LED strip I need, it will be placed in a ceiling cove? not sure how you call it. Anyway, I will not place it facing down but facing sideways which makes the light more diffuse. However, I used your tip and bought the COB LED strip for some additional kitchen cabinets light source. As you suggest, I went with the 24V LED strips and a power supply with a safety margin.
I will definitely look more into ESPhome based options when I get into addressable LEDs.
TIL that quinLED actually has builds for analog controllers.
I also am installing CCT strips and have been looking for good solutions for driving them. I would love to put the quinLED analog boards running wled or esp in place, but unfortunately he doesn’t currently offer any pre-built boards in the analog line, and sourcing all the various bit is beyond the effort i want to put out currently.
other options are the zooz Zen31 controller, but it’s an RGB, and it’s a bit of a hack to make it work as a CCT white controller.
So yea, I’m probably also going to buy one of the gledopto zigbee controllers and see how well it works.
If anyone out there is building and selling some pre-assembled quinLed analog boards, i would be very interested!.
For example I got a 24V “traditional” strip with 10mm width which is rated 14W/m.
The “thin” counterpart with 24V and only 5mm width is “only” rated for 7W/m.
Both strips have 480 leds (3000k) per meter.
So instead going with a WW+CW combined strip maybe just “combine” it yourself
I want to warn not to buy the Gledopto GL-C-006 contoller!
It’s not following the ZigBee standard and messes mit the mesh. They also don’t offer OTA firmware update.
I am here, as I am looking for a review of the GL-C-006P, which should be ZigBee 3 compliant. Which would imply they support OTA firmware update and router functionality.
That is a good point. When looking into Gledopto controllers I realised that you need to get the pro version if you want the Zigbee 3.0. If you buy those on Aliexpress, some descriptions might be confusing because they suggest that the unit supports zigbee 3.0 even though it does not. I got the GL-C-006P version and couple of other ones like GL-C-008P and GL-C-009P. They all work great but for now I am using another gateway to connect them. I then make them available in HA through an integration.
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