So funny story. About 2 years ago, I added light strips to either side of my stairs going to the 2nd level, 600 LED’s in total.
WLED app says for brightest white, 5V 34A PS recommended, but 12A should be enough for most effects. So I bought a 16.5A PS and connected it.
All seemed well, and I lived happily for 2 years not really messing much with the setup. Recently I had to mess with it again and just now, 2 years later, I realized I had the brightness limiter enabled in the WLED app and had it set to 850mA.
So for these past 2 years, I’ve had a 16.5A PS supplying no more than 850mA to 600 leds!! LOL!
I cranked it up to 12000mA just to see and man, it is much brighter. But now that I could have been running these 600 LED’s straight from the ESP32 board, I am wondering if external PS is worth it for most applications.
I could see if I am trying to light an entire room with usable light, but for accent lighting, I dont see the need.
What are your thoughts? Am I missing some other positive to powering from an external PS other than increased brightness?
You are right, for having some nice light effects on normal residential use 10-20% of the theoretic max is quite enough.
Just that there are ignorant people around and when they learn that P=V*I they want to proudly post their mathematics everywhere. In reality, you never get even close to max power, because voltage drop on the strip becomes higher and higher when you give more current. Then let the “power injecting” begin… Again incorrect calculations and fanatic suggestions to “inject every 20cm with at least 14AWG wires”. Best I have seen was person injecting every 15 LEDS with overly thick wires but only to positive side. According to him - (GND) doesn’t count…