Hi all,
I am a total noob when it comes to light. I recently purchased a 5m long led light strip that came with a 12v 2a charger. The led lights become dim towards the end. I have a 12v 6a charger sitting around. My question is can I use this to power up my led strip? Is it dangerous?
welcome to BLF.
If the other power supply provides the exact type of current your LED strip needs, then yes. A working circuit shouldn’t have any problems with higher amperage as it will only draw the required one.
Please note that some electrical circuits require or provide AC instead of DC, and that some LED products may require a constant current power supply.
Thank you very much for the response. To add a bit more context. It’s one of these (
http://s.aliexpress.com/RZzQrAZf) cheap strips. So all in all, my house won’t burn down - correct?
This LED strip requires 12V DC, according to the listing.
If your power supply has 12V DC, it should work.
I have plenty of those around the house, all on older power supplies that are between 2A-5A.
Gotcha. Will increasing the amps help with the dim lights towards the end of the strip?
I don’t know why they are dim!
These cheap strips do not have the best build quality, some LEDs on mine simply don’t work at all.
You can simply hook up a power supply closer to the dim part and see whether resistance is a problem or the reflow didn’t work out in that area.
in my experience, resistance is not a problem with these strips.
Another power supply probably won’t help much with that problem. Problem is with thin conductor in LED strip.
What you can do to solve that is to connect both sides of LED strip to power supply, just be careful you don’t switch wires.
I have seen this problem on many strips, specially cheap ones.
Ive tried dozens of LED strips but never had problem with dimming at the end for a 5M strip. Try a higher power ac dc adapter. I ise 12v 8A. Your power adapter can be higher but not lower output than your LED strips or it will overheat.
The 5M 5050 RGB strips I use are recommend using a power supply rated at 30W per 5 meter strip. I would suspect the seller skimped on the size of the 12V DC converter as it delivers 24W. You can often find 12V DC power supplies at second hand stores like Goodwill. The one I used sells stuff by the pound so they don’t cost much (less than a dollar for a 32W converter). Look for ones that are efficiency level IV or V and with a power cord end like the one on your current power converter.
For 5m you should use at least 3A12V power supply( well, actually it depends on what kind of LED, but just play safe here)
Many presumptions here concerning power supply rating which may be, but Fishwithwings is complaining that the leds at the end of the strip get dim and not the others, right? As XXX-Man says this has to do with insufficient conductor gauge in the led strip, which causes voltage sag. Increasing the power supply rating may help to some extent if the stock 2A supply is also insufficient to start with, but it won't fix the issue. The strip is composed of small leds plus resistor(s) outfits attached in parallel to a long wire carrying the full current.
Let's presume that cheap strip is using AWG24 power wire. Using a voltage drop calculator, when 2A of current goes through 5 meters of AWG24 copper wire back and forth:
This means the led outfits and the end of the string are seeing 1.731V less than those at the very start. If the string's power wire is thinner, this gets even worse.
Cheapest solution is to connect both ends of the string as XXX-Man said. This implies taking the farthest end of the strip back near the power supply. 
Mon, 07/01/2019 - 01:48