I'd like to install a long individually addressable RGB (or RGBW) LED strip along the corner where the walls and ceiling meet (for every room). Ideally in a power efficient way.
At the moment I have one room set up as a prototype with 20m of 5V WS2812B, but it requires two power supplies (due to voltage drop) meaning that it is unnecessarily wasting power because two PSUs are converting 220AC to 5V DC now.
Ideally I would pick a very central location in the house and install one big PSU with enough current to supply every room.
Obviously this would not work with 5V. So I'm wondering if there are any affordable LED strips like the WS2812B ones that can do really long runs without power injection. Maybe something running at 48V?
The only thing I could find was a 10m WS2811 strip running at 24V. I guess I could solder two of them together and supply 24V at the start and at the and of the strip, but my biggest room requires a 23 meter run. And besides that, WS2811B is not fully individually addressable...
This would only work with really thick cables or with additional DC-DC converters.
I don't want to inject anywhere but at the start and the end of each room's LED strip.
Almost any wire is "thicker" than what's built-into the strip. 18AWG wire is about 6 Ohms per 1000 ft.. Let's assume 1Amp and let's assume you can live with a 0.1V drop. From Ohm's Law that's a resistance of 0.1 Ohms. So that's about 16-feet, or 8-feet from the power supply since you have power & ground wires.
But yeah... With 23 meters you may need more than one power supply.
LEDs are the most efficient lighting (as far as I know) but addressable LED strips are "constant voltage" which means a resistor built-into the LED driver for each LED (or each group of LEDs) and that almost doubles the power consumption. It's still highly-efficient but "high power" LEDs and LED "light bulbs" don't work this way.
And it's "difficult" to get lots of wattage because of exactly what you are experiencing... Low voltage requires more current for the same wattage (Power = Voltage x Current). You can't get-around physics.
Right. With higher voltage strips, the LEDs are wired and addressed in groups in series. Most 12V strips have groups of 3 LEDs in series so 60mA can run 3 LEDs. They might be slightly more efficient but the main advantage is that you can power more LEDs with the same current and/or with less voltage loss. I assume 24V strips are addressed in groups of 5 or 6.
