fives t.

I purchased 4 of these 5-m strings to light my porch. Although they went up pretty quickly, the adhesive backing just did not stick well to the wood I was mounting them to. I ended up hot-glueing the strips about every 6 or so inches. That seems to be working well.

One important thing I learned is that when unrolling the strips from the reels you MUST turn the reel (using a pencil through the center). If you lay the reel flat and start uncoiling, you WILL kink the strip! And kinks in the strip are bad, bad, bad. I failed to unroll the first strip properly and kinked it in a few places resulting in a couple of sections of leds that have one color either not working or only working intermittently. I unrolled the other 3 coils properly and have had zero problems - all leds work properly.

The color controllers are apparently pretty sensitive to load. I wired my strips so that the controller powered the first string, then split off to feed the inputs of the 3 amplifiers. This not only did not work, it ruined the controller!

On future projects I am taking no chances with the controller. I'm going to buy an amplifier for each string. I'm going to feed the controller output to the 1st amplifier input, then run the output of amplifier 1 to the first string and (in parallel), to the input of amplifier #2, and so on. This way the color control load is minimal since it is only feeding the input side of 1 amplifier.