DIY: Installing LED Strip Lights
UPDATE: Some people are have asked me exactly what to buy. I've pieced together an LED kit through Amazon Associates, links below in the materials section. Purchasing through these links supports our blog! Yay!
If you haven't noticed by now, we use a lot of LEDs, namely LED strip lights. While I don't recommend using them for main sources of lighting due to their low CRI and colour temperature, they're great for accent lighting and mood lighting. Here is a quick how-to on creating your own installation.
Note that even though LEDs are a low voltage technology, you will still be working with electricity. If you have no experience with soldering or electronics, I do not recommend you try this. There's my disclaimer, so I am not responsible for any adverse outcomes you may have as a result of this tutorial!
Materials:
-Male/female DC connectors (depending on power supply)
-Appropriate sized crimp-on wire terminals (optional)
-Heat shrink tubing (optional)
-Heat gun (optional)
-Multimeter (optional for trouble shooting circuits)
LED Selection
One of the most daunting steps is figuring out which strip you need from the plethora of LED strips available. They come in every colour, multiple shades of "white", RGB, RGBW, dual colour temperature, and more. In addition to the colour, you're faced with wattage/amperage, lumen output, LED chips per reel, chip type (3528, 5050...), waterproof/non-waterproof, etc.
Warm white waterproof 5050 SMD LED strips. These are higher power than the 3528 strips and may require a metal U-channel for heat dissipation to prolong LED life.
Note the smaller chips on this warm white 3528 SMD LED strip.
For most basic uses, I usually use a warm white 12V 3528 600 SMD (Surface-Mount-Device) LED that come on 5m reels (16.4 ft). These are compact and have small, tightly packed 3528 LEDs (600 per reel) for even illumination. They generally have a lower lumen output than 5050 SMD LEDs, but the lower wattage means you can get by with a smaller power supply/driver or longer runs. I also found that some of the higher wattage 5050 SMD LEDs require a heat sink (metal U-channel) or they'll over heat and only last a week or two. You can get LED strips all over the place, but if you're too lazy to search yourself, I've included some Amazon Associate links in the materials section above.
Driver/power Supply Selection
The simplest way to choose your driver is to figure out the entire wattage of your installation, which will be a function of the LED strip type you choose and length. For our example, we'll use the 12V 3528 600 SMD LED strip, which is 48 watts per reel. If you were using, say, 2 meters, your wattage would be 19.2 W (2m/5m*48W = 19.2W).
Once you figure out the required wattage, you need to find an appropriately sized power supply. You should always size your power supply so that the strip is no more than 80% of your power supply. So for our 19.2W 2m strip, we would need a power supply that is at least 24 W (19.2W/0.8 = 24 W). Note that drivers/power supplies will sometimes be reported in amps. In order to figure out the amperage, you just divide your watts by the voltage. So from the above example, you'll need at least a 2A power supply (24W/12V = 2A). Provided you're not getting into more complex wiring schemes that connect branches in series, your power supply should match the voltage of your strips (e.g. 12V or 24V).
If you need to dim your installation, you'll need a dimmable LED driver, which basically flickers the LEDs really fast to simulate a dimmer light (i.e. PWM).
Wiring
When choosing wiring, you are presented with three main options: the insulation/rating, number of conductors, and gauge (size of conductors). If you're planning on fishing wires through walls, look for CSA rated in-wall wire (will be stamped on the jacket). When shopping for wire, you'll see the specs listed as two numbers separated by a slash. The first number is the gauge and the second is the number of conductors inside. For example 16/2 (pronounced "sixteen two") means the jacket contains two conductors which are both 16 gauge.
Gauge is measured on an inverse scale (higher gauge = smaller size). Smaller wires give more resistance and result in more voltage drop. You should not have more than 3% difference in voltage between the beginning of your circuit and your furthest branch. You can use an online calculator like this one to determine what gauge wire will be adequate given the length of wire you need to reach your installation. Enter your length of wire, the gauge, and total amperage; make sure your voltage drop is less than 0.36V (12V*0.03 = 0.36V).
Multimeter and stripped jackets from 16/2 in wall rated wire.
Circuit Planning
You have two strategies in how to wire your circuits: daisy chain or multiple parallel branches. Wiring in a daisy chain fashion simply means connecting your LED strips together end-to-end (positive connected to positive and negative connected to negative), creating a single continuous strip. If your run is short, this is fine. With longer strips, you get more voltage drop and will need to break the total run up into multiple smaller branches, wired in parallel. Generally it's a good idea to make your parallel branches equal in length. In order to figure out if you will need to wire in multiple parallel branches, reference the manufacturer's recommended max run length and don't exceed that for each strip/branch in your circuit. To be extra safe, you can measure the voltage at the beginning and end of your installation and manually calculate the voltage drop on each branch to make sure it doesn't exceed 3%. Another reason I like the 3528 600 strips is because the lower power required puts their maximum run length at 10m, or two full 5m reels!
Note that when wiring in multiple parallel branches, I always arrange strips so they butt start-to-start and end-to-end (see third circuit below and the circuit diagram for our mirror project below). This is because if the beginning of a strip is dimmer than the end (from voltage drop), arranging the strips in this fashion will make it less noticeable by keeping changes in brightness gradual. Not an issue with a small mirror, but can come into play in big rooms.
The top circuit is an example of daisy chain wiring while the bottom two are examples of circuits wired with multiple parallel branches.
Installation
Once you have your planning steps out of the way, it's time to actually connect it all up. I won't go into too much detail here because there's hundreds of videos on Youtube that show how to solder LEDs.
One thing I find handy are crimp on wire quick connectors which I usually get from Princess Auto. If you need to swap out a segment of LEDs, it makes it quick and painless. Wire the whole installation up at your bench before you install it to make sure everything works. A multimeter is extremely handy for trouble shooting any faulty connections.
Below is a sample project showing how we wired up the LEDs behind our mirror in the front entrance way.
Tools and supplies.
Planning is always the first step. The circuit was arranged as two parallel branches comprised of two strips each (four strips total). Each of the parallel branches were connected to one of the two output terminals on our driver. Note the end-to-end and start-to-start arrangement.
Wires soldered to a strip of warm white 3528 600 SMD LEDs.
Once bench tested, the strips have been applied to the back of our mirror with the built in adhesive.
Testing before final installation of the mirror. The strip lights provide a back lit glow for the mirror in our front entrance way.