Power LED Lights + Injection. Complete Walkthrough

In this video I'm going to show you the three most common ways to power LED strips as well as how to inject power in your longer runs for the lights. In this tutorial, I'll be using three identical sets of BTF Lighting WS2812B LED strips. Each strip is five meters long, approximately 16.4 feet, and has a total of 300 individually addressable LED lights.

To power the first strip, I'm going to be using an old Samsung phone charger. This is 5 volts and 2 amps. I'm also going to need a micro USB cord. Now, if you don't have these laying around your house already, you can find a 2-pack on Amazon for about $13. To control everything, I'm going to be using my favorite method which is WLED installed on an ESP8266 Wi-Fi board. If you don't know how to do this, I'll leave a link in the description to a video I made going over the quick and easy setup steps.

Now, you could certainly solder this to the strip, but for simplicity, I'm going to use some breadboard jumper wires. First, take the female end of one wire and plug it into the VIN pin on the board. Next, take the male end of the jumper wire and plug it into the slot that is connected to the red voltage wire that is coming out of the LED strip. Now, plug another jumper wire into the D4 pin on the module and then insert the other end into the middle slot, which is connected to the green wire. This is going to be our data line. Finally, you're going to take one last jumper wire and plug it into the GND pin on the ESP board. The other end will be plugged into the last spot which is connected to the white wire from the LED strip. Now all that's left to do is plug it in.

For the second LED strip, I'm going to be using a 5 volt 10 amp power unit from BTF Lighting. This does come with the barrel plug adapter, which you will need to get up and running. To get this set up, I'm first going to cut off the connector piece at the beginning and strip back all three wires. I'm not going to be using jumper wires this time. Instead, I've already soldered my wires to the VIN, GND, and the D4 pin on the controller. Now, I've used many different wires over the past year, but the ones I'm using here have been my favorite. They're 18 gauge, so they're plenty thick, and since they're wrapped in silicone, they're soft and flexible.

The first thing I'm going to do is take my red wire that I have soldered onto the VIN pin of the controller and twist the end together with the red wire that I stripped in the previous step that is connected to the voltage pad on the LED strip. Next, I'm going to take the barrel plug adapter and insert the red voltage wires that I just twisted together into the positive terminal. Now I'm going to take the black wire that's connected to the GND pin on the module and twist it together with the white wire that is coming out of the GND pad on the LED strip. I can then insert the twisted wires into the negative slot on the barrel plug. The last thing we need to do for this second setup here is twist the green data wires together.

For the third and final power option, I'm going to be using this BTF Lighting 5 volt 60 amp supply unit. You're also going to need a cord like the one I have here to plug it in, and if you don't have one at home, they're pretty cheap on Amazon or you can find them at your local hardware store. The green wire is our ground and will go on the third peg from the end. And here's a tip that I had to unfortunately learn the hard way: make sure it's not plugged in when you're doing this. Now, the next slot is for our neutral wire, and this is where we'll be inserting the white cable. Finally, the black wire, which is the live cable, will be going in the last peg.

Now for getting this all connected to the strips, I'll essentially be doing the exact same thing I did in the second configuration. I'll again be using another ESP8266 module with the three wires already soldered on. Twist together the red wire coming from the VIN pin on the module to the red voltage wire connected to the LED strip. Then connect the black wire from the GND pin on the Wi-Fi board to the white wire that is connected to the GND pad on the lights on the power unit. The first three pegs on the left are the positive terminals, and you can put the red wires we've just twisted together in the first slot. Next, we can take the ground wires we twisted together, which were our white and black, and screw them into the first negative peg, which will be the fourth from the left. Finally, don't forget to twist your green data wires together.

Once everything is plugged in, I'm going to open up the WLED app so we can begin to compare the three options. I'm going to first test these at low power, so I'll be going into each LED strip, clicking on configure near the top right, then going into LED preferences and enabling the automatic brightness limiter and putting it at a maximum current of 850 milliamp. I'm going to be doing this for all three strips so we can begin to compare.

So right now I have all three strips running white, which takes the most power. The right LED strip is the 2 amp phone charger, the middle LED lights is the 10 amp option, and the left is the big unit at 60 amps. As you can see, and what might surprise you is there's no visible difference when we have the brightness limiter set to 850. A feature I love on WLED is the ability to hit the sync button on the top, which means all three LED strips that are connected to their own Wi-Fi board can now be controlled at once, which I'm doing here. I'll go through a few animations before moving on to the next power level.

Next, I'm going to go back into configure LED preferences and change the maximum current to 2000 milliamps. As soon as I hit save, you can tell notable uptick in the brightness on the right LED strip that I just changed. Now I'm going to go into the settings and do the same for the other two. To cut back on glare, I'm going to turn the brightness on my camera down a little bit. Now I was even a little surprised at these results as there is still no noticeable difference in the color or brightness of the three strips.

Next, I'm going to be bumping all three LED strips up to 4000 milliamps to see if I can finally notice a difference. I'll turn the brightness on the camera down again, but finally, you can begin to see a slight yellowish orange tint, I would say about the last half of the first LED strip, which is the one that's being powered by the 2 amp phone charger. Now it's not horrible, but hopefully you're able to spot the difference. As far as I can tell, the second and third strips show no signs of color or brightness change.

I'll quickly run through a few animations again, but one thing to remember is that pretty much all the animations on WLED will never draw the amount of power that having all the lights on solid white will do. So even though there is a slight difference on white, I could not tell any difference between the three strips during any of the animations I tested.

Next, I'll be bumping all three LED strips up to 6000 milliamps. At this level, and it might be hard to tell from the video, but there's a very noticeable drop in color on the first LED strip and a very slight drop in color towards the end of the second LED strip. The third LED strip still seems to be unaffected, which is what you would hope for, being that it is our largest power unit. I also noticed that the animations on some of the ones that had a lot of white are slightly off on the first LED strip while the second and thirds still look the same.

Next, I'm going to go ahead and remove all limits so that they're able to go full throttle. Here, you can see that pretty much the entire first LED strip on the right is not the correct color. I would say about half of the middle strip is a little off, and the last 25% of the third strip is affected. Again, with the animations, the ones that have a good amount of white in it will struggle on the right LED strip. The middle and the left LED strip for the most part still look perfect.

So let's say you have a reason for wanting to have your lights at full white and full brightness, or you simply want to power more LEDs in the 300 I currently have hooked up. This is where you'll need to inject power. There are a few different ways you can do this, but I'll go over what I feel is the easiest. In this next section, I bought a long roll of 20 gauge 3-pin LED extension wire from Amazon, and I'm going to cut a section off that will be a little bit longer than the LED strips themselves. For power injection, you only need two of the wires, so I'll be stripping the white and red ones on both sides.

I'll be taking the new red wire and inserting it into another positive terminal on the supply unit, and then the white wire will be inserted into a negative terminal. Now, we're going to travel to the very end of the LED strip that is attached to this power unit. You'll notice there's an extra set of red and white wires attached at the end. These are what I'll be stripping and connecting together with the cables I just attached to the source in the last step. A quick side note: if you don't have the extra cables at the end, you could certainly just solder the long power injection wires to any of the pads. You would need to cut the exposed wire down to a smaller length than I have here, but the red would go to the voltage pad and the white would go to the GND pad.

But since I do still have the wires at the end, I'll be twisting the white together with the white and the red together with the red. So to recap, I'm only going to be injecting power into the left LED strip right now. I separated one of the wires so there's no power injection happening. You'll have to look closely, but in a second, I'll put the wires together, and you should see a slight increase in the brightness more towards the end of the strip. If you missed it, I'll go back and forth a little so hopefully you can see the change.

Now, the fact that it's not a huge difference means there's almost no need to inject power with the 60 amp option when you're only using 300 LEDs like I have here. So next, I'm going to add another string of 300 LEDs to the end of this one. I'll be making a U-turn and bringing the second strip back towards the supply unit.

So what you're looking at is 600 LEDs, which are being powered by the 60 amp unit, but I've disconnected the injection point here so that they're only getting juice from the initial connection point on the first LED strip down here. Next, I'll reconnect and then disconnect the injection point a few times so you can get a better feel for the difference it makes.

Now, even with our power injection, you can tell that there's obviously some voltage drop here on the second LED strip. So the last thing I'm going to do is add another power point at the end of the lights on the left. Since the end of the second strip is right here, I only need to cut a small strip of extension wires to make the connection to the power unit. I'll now be doing the same thing I did previously when connecting the first injection point.

Now, I just need to twist the red wire that's coming out of the end of the LED strip to the red injection wire that I just attached to the positive terminal on the unit and then do the same with the white wires. I also want to mention that anytime you have exposed open wires, I recommend using some heat shrink tubing or at least some electrical tape. For something like this where I'm just doing some tests, in this picture I have the power at the beginning; I have it added in the middle, but I have the injection wire disconnected at the end. In this picture, I just connected the injection wire here, and you should have been able to tell a slight difference. I'll go back and forth here a little bit so you can see it a few more times.

As far as I can tell with the power injection in the middle and at the end, I'm able to run 600 LEDs at full brightness with no noticeable drop in color using the 60 amp power supply. So in conclusion, if you're looking for something to go by, I would say if your project is 150 LEDs or less, try the 2 amp phone charger option first. Anything from 150 to 300 LEDs, I would probably just go with the 10 amp option. Anything 300 or above, my advice would be to use the big guy.

Thank you all so much for watching. I'm going to leave you with a few pictures and videos of some of my other completed how-to projects that you can find on my channel.

Bye!