Good morning/afternoon everyone. I am doing my first attempt at building my own LED Christmas lights setup. I have two ways i can do the setup and i wanted to get everyones opinion on what the best option would be.
I have a total of 5 strands of 12v WS2811 strings. Each string is 33ft long, 100 pixels per string. I am controlling them with a ESP8266. My power supply is 12v 30amp. I have a 12v to 5v converter for powering the ESP8266.
I built everything out in the garage. All strands connected, setup all of the configuration of WLED and everything works perfectly fine. 1 power supply was sufficient for all 5 strands. I put the power at the end of the second strand. Both ends of the strings had right at 11.7v so i do not need to inject power at any additional points. I powered the ESP off of the 12v/5v converter, 12v to the LED’s off the 12v side of the converter.
So now the two choice for putting them on the house.
Option 1 - set it up exactly as it was in the garage. The problem i am concerned with is connecting the downstairs strings with the upstairs. I can run 16ga 3 conductor wire from the end of the downstairs string to the upstairs string which is 9ft. Does that seem like a reasonable solution? That would put the total length all in of 180ft. The benefit of doing this is all of the lights will flow as one. One ESP and power supply, less wires to run.
Option 2 - Have one complete setup downstairs and a separate complete setup for upstairs. Benefit to this is no power issues (potentially). The downside is the lights wont all flow as 1. Yes i can sync the two WLED setups but that will just make them do the same thing at the same time, not really what i want.
Sorry if this just confused everyone lol. It is difficult to type what I am thinking. If anyone has any other suggestions please dont hesitate to share! If more info is needed let me know.