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General project discussion / help
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By uncleziggy
#195139
new to all this so i need some help. I purchased some LED strips off of aliexpress.com for a LED sign/screen project. I am trying to determine the right power supply/transformer to get. Here are the lights i purchased

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/5M-60-l ... 0.0.wgjdF0

the power consumption they list seems to me to be way out of wack, excessively high. the are 5v strips. i will be using 23 meters for my project. can anyone please help me determine the right power supplies i need?
By n1ist
#195141
60mA for white * 60 LED per meter * 5 volts = 18W/meter
18W/meter * 23M is 414 watts or 82.8A at 5V.
So yes, this will draw a *LOT* of power.

You can't feed that much power down the strip. I would cut the 5V rail every 3-4 meters and use a separate power supply for each segment. I would also feed each segment at both ends (ie run a 14 or 16awg wire between the 5v line of each segment and a another for the ground and feed those wire; you may need to feed it more often if your whites turn pink or yellow). This way you would not be trying to shove 14.4A down the thin traces on the strip.

Other ways to reduce the power draw are to run the strips at lower maximum brightness (ie max of 127 instead of 255 should cut the draw roughly in half), ensure that you will never have more than half of the LEDs on at full brightness at one time, or lower the voltage a bit (run the strips at 4.5V instead of 5V)/

/mike