Been doing some googling to try and work out what to purchase to setup 2 LED light strips in my kitchen. One above the kitchen high-level cabinets for ambient lighting and one below for worktop lighting. I want to be able to control the two strips separately. One strip is 4m & the other 3m long.
I’ve gone for Zigbee and hopefully it’s all home assistant compatible. Also chosen COB as the light looks more uniform from what I’ve seen/read.
14x0.5m Aluminium U Channels with Transparent coversLink
UK Plug and cable to cut connector off for 12v transformer Link
Anything I’ve missed or looks wrong? I’ve assumed I can use one 12v 100w transformer to power the 2 separate Zigbee controllers. The strips say 8w per meter (7 meters 60w) so if my assumptions right it looks like there’s headroom? I do need 2 controller for the two strips being controlled independently don’t I?
There is headroom on the transformer, but not on the controller. At 8.6W per meter, the longer 4m strip will require about 35W. The Zigbee controller can output 3A per channel, so can support up to 36W when powered by 12V. This is cutting it a little close — typically you want about 20% overhead — so consider getting 24V strips & transformer instead, increasing the output limit to 72W per channel.
In theory, no. But in practice it depends on how the controller exposes its internal channels in Home Assistant. For example my 4-channel RGBW Z-Wave controller exposes each of the channels in HA as its own (white) dimmer entity, with a fifth aggregated RGBW entity that slides all the other dimmers behind the scenes — I ignore the RGBW entity and just use the four dimmer entities with four independently-controlled white COB strips. I also have a Matter-over-WiFi RGBW LED controller, and it exposes only a single light entity to HA, so cannot be used with multiple independent white strips. Maybe someone who has the WZ5 can report which approach it uses. On the other hand, they’re pretty cheap, so maybe buy two and if you only need one you can keep the other as a spare.
Just noticed when having a look into the 24v version of the strips that the 528led version I was going to get is actually 13-14w per meter so would be 56w 4m & 42w 3m, 98w total.
I’ll change the strips to the 24v versions but looks like I need to find a 240 to 24v transformer with more watts than the 100w model I was looking at (min120w for some headroom?) There dosent seem to be as many options in the higher watt transformers. Other than needing two plugs I’m starting to wonder where to power each driver with its own transformer and plug