Electronic – Maximum length of WS2815 strips

led strippower

I have six 12V WS2815 that I would like to connect in a series and control with WLED running on an nodeMCU board. I have the 5m x 30LED/m = 150 LED strips.

I'm struggling to figure out the proper way to power these strips. The specifications say that the 30 LED/m strips use 9 W/m, so that's 45 W per strip. At 12V, that's 3.75A per strip, or 22.5A for all six.

I assume that I can't just hook up a 25A 12V power supply to one end of the series of strips and call it a day, that's way too much power flowing along the entire length of the strips and something will go poof.

How many of these can I safely power together from a single end?

What gauge wire do I need to supply power?

Should I keep all the power lines connected across all the strips, and inject power at certain intervals, or is it better to just keep the data lines connected and power each strip or set of strips independently?

Best Answer

Grabbing current capacity from this chart: wiring gauge current capacity

I would probably run a bundle of 12-14 gauge wire and put power on both ends of each strip. led strip wiring