The biggest influence in any home? The lighting! One of our favorites for lighting is LED Strips. They do wonders for accent lighting, especially when you try different colors.
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With all the DIY strips on the market, we are often asked why Loxone LED strips are more expensive than those you might find on Amazon or eBay. There can be significant differences in the quality of the chips, resistors and coatings, which necessitate a higher price tag. Put simply, its a case of buy cheap, buy twice
Were not suggesting that you need to go out and spend a fortune on LED strips; instead, whats more important is that you seek out quality strips that will last. But how can you tell which LED strips are high quality and which arent? Here are four things to watch out for when buying your strips.
One of the first things to look for when buying an LED strip is the number of LED chips on the strip and the distance between the chips.
Loxone WW Strips have 300+ LED chips per five meter strip
RGBW strip has 300 chips per 16ft
Cheaper strips of the same length will have less than half the number of chips, meaning they are placed farther apart
The lack of this natural luminosity in cheaper LED strips is often artificially increased by using LEDs supplied with higher amperage. As you can guess, this has a negative effect on the life of the LEDs.
Cheaper LED strips, as you might expect, not only have fewer chips along with their length but even then those sparingly placed chips arent quite up to scratch, so they end up failing prematurely. Its a bit of a false economy, rather like buying basic chocolate chip cookies you have to eat at least two to stand any chance of getting a decent amount of chocolate!
These are our experiences of working with LED strips, but in order to give our theories some empirical grounding, weve taken three LED strips of various qualities and prices and put them to the test. These strips were:
So lets take a look at our findings:
Comparison 1:
Warm white LED strip RGB LED strip RGBW LED stripWhy the separate chips for RGB and warm white in the RGBW strip? The reason for this is so that a truly white light can be achieved (RGB LED strips can only create a cool, slightly blueish light.)
Heres the evidence:
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Comparison 1 is on the right, whilst comparison 2 is on the left in the photos below:
Comparison 2:
For this test, we looked at the difference between the cheap RGB strip and the more expensive RGBW when creating a blue hue.
RGB LED strips RGBW LED stripsThe conductor track connects each LED chip and is used to run power to each chip. Since the track is made of copper, which is one of the more expensive elements of the strip, savings are made by cutting back on the amount of copper used.
This results in a thinner conducting track, which leads to poor heat dissipation and as a result, the LED strips fail much earlier. Look for LED strip lights with larger, thicker copper tracks, as they will be much more durable. Youll find that better quality LEDs dissipate heat more efficiently and the strips do not bend as easily.
Cheap LED strip lights are equipped with smaller resistors to provide a better luminous result. This puts an additional burden on the LED chips and consequently shortens their lifespan. Higher quality LED strips have the appropriate resistors, so you get a longer lasting strip with excellent luminosity.
As you can see from our photos, the cheaper warm white strip has several cracks along its length from cheap, brittle coating. Aside from looking awful, this creates an issue as the parts are exposed not exactly safe!
High quality LED strips have a stable, odorless coating, even when theyre in use and the coating is being heated. Cheap LED strips are not for sensitive noses, as we found out during our test. The noxious wafts of cheap plastic could be smelt long before the strip was switched onis it really worth it?!
On a more serious note, consider the IP rating of your LED strip light. We sell LED strips with three different IP ratings: IP20, IP65, and IP68, which are classed as not protected, splash-proof and waterproof, respectively.
If youve opted for waterproof LED strips in the garden, for example, and your coating gets crackedhow waterproof will they be then? With a high quality strip, youre getting a much better, more thorough coating which will see you through years of use.
For more information, please visit LED strip light manufacturer.