Electronic – use a 25 meter LED stripe with a single power adapter

ledled strippower supplyrgbsafety

I have 5 stripes of 5m length and 300 RGB LEDs (type 5050) each. One LED consumes about 20 mA at 12 V. Therefore, my whole 25m setup would use about 30 A.

5050 RGB LED stripe

Is it safe to connect the 5 stripes series and powering one end with a 30 A power adapter? I wonder whether the small traces on the PCBs can handle that. If that's not possible, what would be a safe setup?

Best Answer

See the comments I left with your question.

Personally, I would power each 5m strip with its' own cable coming back to your controller or power supply. Note that the common lead has to handle the sum of the currents for each of the colors and thus should either be a larger conductor or multiple conductors in parallel.