12V LED Strip Lighting for Patio Needed for both RGB and Warm White

Thread Starter

Jeff Myren

Joined Jun 3, 2015
2
I just renovated and expanded a patio complete with an outdoor stone fireplace, retaining wall and pavers as the base. The lighting a sound system are left as the finishing touches and I need some advice on how to wire the LED's I bought...

There are three beams supporting the covered patio roof on the part of the patio that extends from the house roughly 13 feet long. On the two outside beams I will install LED strips on the side of the beam toward the center beam (angled toward the ceiling so the light bounces off...indirectly lighting the area and easy on the eyes) and on the center beam there will be a strip on each side of the beam). I have one light switch inside of the house. I was intending to wire this to four 150W waterproof power supplies. The LED supplier said 3x150W power supplies. If it was all just these four strands, it would be easy but this is where it gets more complicated. I also want RGB lights so I have 4 separate strips that will run alongside the warm white strips (for a total of 8 strips that are 13 feet long). I only want the warm white OR the RBG on at a given time and was hoping to use the same 4 power supplies for both.

Each power supply outputs 150W and had two wires coming out of it. I am not sure if that means each wire provides 75W or if the two leads simply make it easier to connect it to different devices.

I was thinking I could have the light switch (inside the house) power on all 4 power supplies to turn the lights on or off, and then both output wires for each power supply would go into four separate 3 way switches. All four switches would need to be manually changed to switch the power from going to the RGB strands or the warm white strands.

I am not sure if I can just join all 8 wires (two from each of the 4 power supply outputs for a total of 600W) into a single wire nut leading to a three way switch and then have the output of the 3 way switch output through 4 separate wires (all joined together) on one side for each warm white strip, and then 4 separate wires leading to the RGB strips. I may draw a diagram if this is confusing.
 

Bernard

Joined Aug 7, 2008
5,784
Specs on LED strips would be helpfull. 11.5 W/ ft. seems likr over kill.
I would keep single power supplies dedicated to single strips.
Two DPDT @ 15 A switches should do for 4 lines.
Two wires from PS color coded, maybe red & black; red supply, black return.
 

Thread Starter

Jeff Myren

Joined Jun 3, 2015
2
Thank you for the reply. I had not thought about using DPDT switches (I just Google it to see what those are). I think the switch inside the house is tied to a 15A dedicated circuit but I need to double check. There is a separate switch inside that is tied to a box outside for a future ceiling fan but that can be hijacked if needed. I believe the two wires from the power supplies are both black. I will try to look up the spec sheets later tonight as I am in the middle of some things now. Please see attached for the wattage requirements of the strips.

For the digital addressable RGB lights, they require an RGB controller at the beginning of the run to supply the data on which LED's should be which color. The power for the RGB lights should be supplied throughout but the data line needs to link everything in a series.Screenshot_2015-06-04-12-57-38.png Connection for RGB digital addressable led strip light.jpg Connection for Warm white led strip light-1.jpg
 
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