7 Common LED Strip Fails and How to Avoid Them

LED strip light is the most popular light source, lots of individual buyers install it at home, but their limited experience may cause the installation imperfect. Here are 7 common fails and solutions for you to avoid them.

7 Common LED Strip FAILS and How To Avoid Them

Fail 1: Exposed LEDs

LED strips gives off harsh light, especially for low chip density strips. You can see light spot of each LEDs if install it as direct light source, it ruins the entire lights effects. On the other hand, exposed LEDs is prone to be damaged without protection.

Solution: a. Aluminum profile, the diffuse on aluminum profile enhances the light distribution, it makes the strip look more even. What’s more, metal helps heat dissipation which prolongs strips’ life-span. There is lots of aluminum profile shapes for different applications, such as mini types, corner types and wall skirting line types, etc.

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　 　b. Silicone gel neon tube, it’s the best choice for some application with curved shape which aluminum cannot fit. Neon tube is bendable and it’s also featured with diffuse to help the uniformity of LED strips. There are a few types of neon tube, like side-bending, top-bending, 3D and 360°. Choose the right one for the application and be sure it matches to your strip’s width.

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Fail 2: Hot spots

For indirect installation, hot spots is common, this is due to uniform distance or angel to the surface that LED strips is projecting on. For example, looping the strip for turns at the corner, it increases LED density and gives more light than any other place. Strip dropping from the wall by adhesive tape failure is another cause of hot spots.

Solution: Use “L” shape connectors instead of looping the strip. Clean surface of the subject where you are going to install the strip or use self-adhesive mounting clips to avoid strip falling.

Fail 3: It does not have to be RGB LED strip

RGB LED strip can generates white light by mixing red, green and blue channel, but it’s not as pure as white strips, sometimes bluer, sometimes greener, it’s decided by the power of each color.

Solutions: Buy white LED strips if only white light needed, RGBW provides an extra white channel than RGB, this is a better choice rather than RGB. RGBCCT offers tunable white option but costs more.

Fail 4: Wrong power supply

Choosing wrong power supply may cause the LED strip to be damaged or not working properly, their output voltage and current must match to each other.

Solution: Make sure LED driver matches with LED strip, calculate how much power the strips rated, get a power supply that provides at least 20% more power than the strips needs.

Voltage drop is another problem for long run LED strips, it’s due to voltage drop. To avoid this problem, choose high voltage like 24V strip lights instead of 5V strip lights, or connect both ends to the same power supply.

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Fail 5: LED density

Normally, the higher density the strips is, the more even illumination it gives, and the more expensive it is.

Solution: Choose aluminum profile or silicone gel neon tube to improve the uniformity of the strips, or choose COB strip lights instead of SMD strip lights, it’s the latest technology which enables LED strips to be with super high density chips.

Fail 6: Individually addressable LED strip

Addressable RGB LED strip is cool, it presents more vivid color changing than standard strips, it can be lighten up by preprogrammed mode. IC, such as WS2811, WS2812, DMX512, SK6812 is the key component to achieve addressable function, but it raises the risk of strip failure. One IC stops working would lead to all following strip units stop working.

Solution: Don’t buy it unless it’s necessary to your project. Choose LED strips with WS2813 IC, this chip has dual-signal channel, it improves signal transmission stability, allowing for longer strips without signal loss.

Fail 7: Remote control

It’s nice to have a remote control to dim brightness, change color and switch mode of LED strip, but what if it’s lost?

Solution: Wi-Fi controller is more and more popular now, with your smart phone, it can achieve more complex and intelligent control functions like music synchronization.

Apart from these 7 common fails, You might face other problems when install LED strips, just contact us for help if you don’t know how to solve it, we have been in this industry for over 10 years which you can rely on.