LED strip light length limitations?

J

JoeNorm

Senior Member
Location
WA
I have a customer who wants LED strip under her entire deck railing. One section is 75' long and the other section is about 25' long.

If I fed the center of the 75' run should I be ok with this this length? I have never done such a long, continuous run.

thanks
Brett
 
Little Bill said:
The driver specs will tell you the length and wattage the driver will support.
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The driver spec's will limit the wattage. 60W max for 12 volt or 96W max for 24V to be Class 2 but it will not give you a maximum tape length. You need to look at the tape specs for the maximum run. Tape wattage can very from roughly 1W to 6W per foot.
 
curt swartz said:
The driver spec's will limit the wattage. 60W max for 12 volt or 96W max for 24V to be Class 2 but it will not give you a maximum tape length. You need to look at the tape specs for the maximum run. Tape wattage can very from roughly 1W to 6W per foot.
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I put in some UC lights a few years ago and the driver absolutely gave a max distance. The lights and driver were the same brand. I can't remember the brand as the HO ordered them.
 
My biggest concern for long runs, is not voltage drop, but conductor size. How much current will the little flat strip tying the LED’s together handle? You know the manufacturer is using the smallest possible.
 
hillbilly1 said:
My biggest concern for long runs, is not voltage drop, but conductor size. How much current will the little flat strip tying the LED’s together handle? You know the manufacturer is using the smallest possible.
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Voltage drop is the only relevance of length to conductor sizing.

The so called LED "driver" is often time a plain 12v power supply. The LED strip light manufacturer has quite a bit of freedom as far as how it is handled once it's fed into the strip.

The LED strip itself contains numerous LED elements and associated LED ballasts (one LED ballast per every 3-4 LED dice in series) and they're made like a ladder. The spacing between each rung is the cutting length step. Those that use a simple passive resistor as the ballast will be sensitive to voltage drop over the length and there is often a noticeable difference in output on the closest vs farthest end from the power input.

If each rung has a current regulator diode instead of a fixed resistor as the ballast, the amount of voltage flared off in the ballast is changed to maintain constant current within each rung and will hold the same current until the input voltage is too low to maintain the set current level.
 
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