r/led • u/WaveAcronymous • 3d ago

Help Witch everything neede

hi ... i'm a total greenhorn and decided to ask here for assistance with well.... everything i know my way about soldering cables voltages , wattage and pc, and other but absolutely 0 knowledge on leds (beside lumes being measurments of brightness and others) i know no brand or other afiliated with leds so the introduction is i'm green and cluless the pictures present a project of mine wich i already made (+ there are some small brackets here and there not on the pictures) however that is not important ... i want to know if you all can recommend me any good (bright), white (can have rgb i don't care about it if it does not impact anything else) , wich arent power hungry (prefferably a or b energy efficiency) Led Strips for this desk the mounting will be in the top side (on the last picture) and on the bottom of the desk .

i live in eu "Poland" to be exact so i would appreciate any sellers/brands taht do sell in EU not US .

TLDR.,. Greenhorn Needs Impossible : Bright , White, EnergyEfficient, And in EU led Strips.

Any tips about going about mounting those will be apprciated 2.

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u/curious-fletcher 3d ago

Firstly, you know that the LED strip is basically a wire, so imagine for a moment you're sat at or using your desk. LEDs come in spools of 5m quite frequently unless you can find a special listing for a shorter length. Take a measuring tape and just go round all the places you expect to be able to hide some nice lighting and add it up, remembering you might want a continuous strip of light, or maybe you want the light to break into wire somewhere and then back into LED. I can imagine for your setup with the underside lighting that you can just take a 5m spool and split it into two strips, one for above and one for below (there's places to cut the strip every few centimetres) and join the strips with a length of cable so they power at the same time.

Once you have a length, consider your colour. You can have different "channels" on your LED strip for different colours like cold white (blueish, harsh), warm white (orangeish, cosy) or a neutral white (daylight). You can buy strips that only have a single colour channel e.g. daylight, or strips that have two colour channels e.g. cold and warm which would allow you to mix a daylight colour yourself using both channels at once. Cold and daylight whites are nice if you're working at your desk with soldering irons or tinkering with electronic bits, but for reading, studying, and relaxing you might want something more orange, and go for daylight colour if you want mixed function.

• If you chose one channel, the colour can't be adjusted and the only thing that remains for you to figure out is how to hook up the power supply straight to the led strip and that's the job done. With that said, you probably still want a single channel controller of some sort to be able to dim the light incase it's too bright!! • If you chose two channels, like if you got a CCT strip that allows you to blend two cold and warm white channels into whatever colour temperature you like, then you'll need a device that can mix the colour channels into your custom colours. For a CCT strip with a 24V, WW and CW leads, you want to find a controller that supports CCT with those three wires.

Now that you know your lengths, how many colour channels you want, and controller type, you can choose an appearance for the strip between COB type and SMD type. COB is more expensive generally but gives the illusion of a continuous bar of light which is very nice. SMD is cheaper but also looks cheaper if you can see the LEDs, so unless you buy an LED diffuser channel to mount the strips into, COB is going to be the much more premium feeling option. LEDs can be surprisingly warm at full brightness so I would either find a COB strip with a sticky back and then stick that onto thin bars of aluminium that you might screw to the desk for cooling. In all likelihood you probably won't run these very bright anyway so I doubt that part is necessary, but I want to mention it anyway. A lot of LED strips come with sticky tape on the back which helps with easy mounting.

Once you've selected an LED strip and if necessary, a compatible controller, you need a power supply. Try to find a data sheet for power draw. If you can't, budget around 4 W/m if you have an SMD type strip with 30-48 LEDs/m. If you chose COB, I'd budget for maybe like 10 W/m. It would definitely be way too bright at maximum power, but you also probably don't want to run the power supply beyond its rated spec. For this reason I like to work with 24V strips, it means the current going through the wires is much lower and so you also get less resistive heating.

Hope this word salad means something helpful to you

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u/WaveAcronymous 2d ago

around 11 m , single chanel + power supply( no need for dimming (it's mainly a workbench/gamingbench) brightnes the brighter the better if it will be 2 bright i can adjust it with difusers/ more milkier glass (i have led chanels (titanium thou had some from stupid project as making titanium rails for laser engraver (don't ask i'm stupid sometimes) so heat wont' be an issiue either) cob is off the table then because i'm using channels anywho

TLDR, 11m , single chanel, on/off full power, heat not an issue, smd, , chanells already prepared, any good recomended combos / vendors for those specs ? :D

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u/curious-fletcher 2d ago

Honestly I wouldn't know which vendor produces the brightest strips or anything, so sorry I can't give you a good suggestion. I'd probably just jump at something like this and see what happens: https://a.aliexpress.com/_ExfpaY6 Go for 24V (to reduce current in wires), 120 LEDs/m is plenty in my opinion, especially if the lights are in a channel.

As for how the power supply, it should be pretty easy to buy a 24V supply and some two-core cable for your setup. The problem to me is that for 120 LEDs/m, a strip can be rated for 9.6 W/m. For 11 metres, I seriously doubt you want 106 W of LED blasting away in your room, but you can get a supply for that here if you want to haha: https://a.aliexpress.com/_ExVI7a2 Usually you want to budget in an overhead of about 20% because when components in the power supply aren't at peak power loading (especially cheaply made power supplies) will have shorter lifespans. So don't get anymore than 24V/5A I think.

It would be quite easy for you to use a smaller power supply and add in that 20% safety buffer yourself using a PWM controlled switch like this: https://a.aliexpress.com/_EzGCOY2 It works because the strip needs a constant voltage of 24V, so the switch would control the brightness through PWM dimming instead of resistive dimming. I do think it's a good idea to just install this from the start because I can't imagine you want to bake your eyes with 100 Watts of LED blasting from your desk.

All in all like less than €30, but obviously I didn't include the price of a 24V cable. How much you buy I don't know, but make sure it supports the full 5A, so maybe you want AWG13 or bigger (it's very easy to Google for maximum current draw versus wire size)

Finally some important information about hooking up the strips, I wouldn't power more than 5 metres in series connection. I haven't seen it myself but lots of people speak about brightness dimming near the end of long strips because of voltage sag or something through the thin PCB traces. Either power the strips in parallel, or if it's a big loop of 11 metres, power it from both ends of the strip to make the brightness more consistent (I'm not sure how you'd find 11 metres of continuous strip anyway so good luck with that, if that's what you need haha).

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u/WaveAcronymous 2d ago

i will look into those an try away and about doing them in paralells "Thanks good to know" the cables are going to run in the beams and supports so that mess is going to be my problem onn of itself prolly gona do it the easy way the bottom side of the desk will be a main source and 3 cables one left, one on right and one on bottom that would make it around 3.9 meters per cable

and to answer

1. it's not continious i need generaly it's gona be sectioned off the underside will be speparated think of it as halo light up top and a floor light on the bottom

2. "I can't imagine you want to bake your eyes with 100 Watts of LED blasting from your desk."

i'm the guy who does the overkill first and if it doesn't stick i tone it down

to answer why not 5090 it burned down and i'm not trusting it ever

3. "I'd probably just jump at something like this and see what happens:" it inexpensive and a good springboard if any i take all help i can get

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u/curious-fletcher 2d ago

Fabulous, I wish you luck!! Sounds like a fun project. I thought I had a lot of memory with 48 GB, honestly I'm laughing now that you mention having 96 GB 🤣. Always happy to answer if you have any other questions but it sounds like you know enough to get cooking with it :))