5050 LED strip AC adapter issues

[spiff44]

I'm just wondering if anyone has had their house burn down because of one of these yet... I bought 20 of these 5050 300 LED strips off Amazon.. they are not all the same brand, color, ect and consequently all of the little AC adapters that they come with are different too.

But one thing that they're all the same about is that they are crap. I have had about half of them short out.. meaning I get a loud pop out of it and a puff of smoke. The ones that haven't done this yet seem borderline since they're always very hot.

Because of this I bought two 600watt power blocks from superbrightleds.com to power the bulk of my strips but I like just having one of the old adapters to just power a single strip for main use on a timer. (use the 600watter when turning the rest on at the same time- the single is on a timer to keep the fish in subdued normal lighting most of the time) But I'm not sure that I can trust these stupid things.

I might just run them all off the 600watters and then put separate inline power switches to ease my mind.. these things are solid state and fully protected..

Thoughts?

 

[deeda]

I'm curious how long your 300 LED strips are and what is the wattage on the AC adapters that are being fried.

It is very important that you stay below the recommended 82% of the output wattage of the transformer; e.g. when you have a 5050 LED strip of 300 LED's = 16 feet or a total of 57.8 watts, you should use a 100 watt power supply. Superbrightleds does give you the calculator for the proper power supply to use based on the LED strip you are buying.

We experienced a similar issue with frying a couple AC adaptors when we bought our first 16 foot strip of 5050 LED's.

 

[spiff44]

They're all the 3 meter 300LED strips, just different color and brands. They all came with the power supply, a dimmer and the wiring. I didn't use the dimmer on any of them, just hooked them straight the power plug. I always solder the connections too.

So these adapters are supposed to be rated for these lights... they are just crap. I don't have the specs as I don't have one with me now. Interesting to hear that you have had a similar experience.

I think I talked myself into avoiding these things and going with the solid state ones instead. This will mean a bit of extra wiring (separate in line switches on the bundle of 10 strips per power supply for better control) but will be worth it. In fact, the plan is just to cut off all the radial power plug ends off these cheaper adapters to reuse them on the solid state setup.