Christmas Lights Setup Question

Questions
1

Good morning/afternoon everyone. I am doing my first attempt at building my own LED Christmas lights setup. I have two ways i can do the setup and i wanted to get everyones opinion on what the best option would be.

I have a total of 5 strands of 12v WS2811 strings. Each string is 33ft long, 100 pixels per string. I am controlling them with a ESP8266. My power supply is 12v 30amp. I have a 12v to 5v converter for powering the ESP8266.

I built everything out in the garage. All strands connected, setup all of the configuration of WLED and everything works perfectly fine. 1 power supply was sufficient for all 5 strands. I put the power at the end of the second strand. Both ends of the strings had right at 11.7v so i do not need to inject power at any additional points. I powered the ESP off of the 12v/5v converter, 12v to the LED’s off the 12v side of the converter.

So now the two choice for putting them on the house.

Option 1 - set it up exactly as it was in the garage. The problem i am concerned with is connecting the downstairs strings with the upstairs. I can run 16ga 3 conductor wire from the end of the downstairs string to the upstairs string which is 9ft. Does that seem like a reasonable solution? That would put the total length all in of 180ft. The benefit of doing this is all of the lights will flow as one. One ESP and power supply, less wires to run.

Option 2 - Have one complete setup downstairs and a separate complete setup for upstairs. Benefit to this is no power issues (potentially). The downside is the lights wont all flow as 1. Yes i can sync the two WLED setups but that will just make them do the same thing at the same time, not really what i want.

Sorry if this just confused everyone lol. It is difficult to type what I am thinking. If anyone has any other suggestions please dont hesitate to share! If more info is needed let me know.

2

I like option 1 mostly because you said you would use #16 3-cond cable for interconnection betwee the two sections.

If you also inject power at one end of the 3m (9’) 3-cond #16 cable, you may have a winner.

Only thing I missed (or overlooked seeing) was how the ground wires from the 12/5V converter and the supply were to get connected. Without that interconnection things can get strange on the data line over time. Might work fine today, but tomorrow with nothing different except passage of time it might completely flake out on you.

That makes for bad WAF and head scratching.

If you already had that covered, kudos to you. I look forward to hearing how things went after you get done.

I’m installing 10x50 led/strip around the porch, railings, columns, and front door. My trick will be to stretch interconnections between strips so it’s one long strip of 500 leds. Last weekend we had them stretched all over the living room floor testing out the supply, wled 0.11, and looking for potential injection points. Because these LED’s are connected with #18, the 6A 12V supply never had a problem pushing 500 LED’s even without injection. Was super impressed and pleased.

3

Thanks for the response. I will go with option 1 and see how it works. I will certainly update after trying it. I have a lot of 5v strips running in the house and the voltage drop is insane. On the other hand the 12v option is amazing. I cant believe that having 500 pixels i am only getting most 1.4v drop.