HOW TO SOLDER LED STRIP LIGHTS

[Music] welcome to crown molding led lighting i'm going to show you the best way to solder power wires on the end of an led strip i'm also going to explain to you why soldering is better than clip connectors okay here are some tools and supplies that you will need to solder wires on the ends you need a power pack or transformer to do your testing when you're complete this is a 300 watt heater that we use to shrink wrap our tubing on the end of our led strips we have a pair of wire cutters a pair of scissors that we use to cut our led strips at the segment that we need we go a little extra and we put liquid tape under the shrink tube and then we have our tubes and we have a heat sink that we put on our tape and this protects the heat from migrating into the chip then we have our solder which is an o32 rosin or flex core solder works extremely well then we have our little pigtail wires that we're going to use to solder on the ends of our strips you'll need some wire strippers these are more professional type pull apart they make cheaper ones with a little gauge on the side that you can set the gauge of your wire and strip and then there's the most common ones with the little gauge marks in it and here's our soldering iron we're going to set our soldering iron at 450 degrees fahrenheit before we get started you might be asking why would i want to solder a wire on the end of an led strip when snap-on connectors are available well to start out with there's different kinds of led strips there's some real cheap ones that are about eight to ten bucks and when you go to try sliding it under the end of the little fingers it's just very difficult and they pull out very easily or they'll tear apart like you see on this one then they make a mid-grade strip that has more copper into it and they can be pushed under it i'm going to show you on these little fingers there's a little point right there and that's all that's holding the strip in and it doesn't give you the full power of the contact on the strip when these are closed and snapped shut they just don't hold very well they pulled out don't lose their contacts so that's why we solder wires on another thing i'd like to address with you on in pigtails or on couplings most of these manufacturers use a very very small wire just like a 22 or 24 gauge and this is only good for like one strip when you add two or multiple strips together you'll start losing your voltage because of this very fine wire now we use a 16 gauge wire and that makes all the difference in the current going down that strip and that'll give you better lighting now i'll strip the wires with a 16 gauge wire slot so what we're going to do is go inside there and we're going to strip about 3 30 seconds of an inch just enough to get on that led copper pad and the other end we normally strip about a quarter inch and ten these so these can go into our connectors on our led strips but as you can see it's just 3 30 seconds of an inch before we get started tinting the stripped ends of our wire there's one thing i want to bring to your attention the end of the soldering iron is imperative that you keep it clean that keeps all those contaminants from getting into the wire into the solder and when you go to solder to your led strip you take that contamination with you it makes it harder for it to heat up and to bond correctly so you want to keep that clean at all times okay we're going to tin the ends of our wire my tip is clean and what i'm going to start doing is to put a little solder on you can see it makes it shiny it has a little bubble and that's called wetting it now you can put that on the end of your wire and that helps the conductivity of the heat go through the wire if you heat it for a few seconds then you can add your solder to it and it'll migrate through all the strands on the end i don't have so much room i'm going to just touch it on the end i'm going to put a little solder on it and hold it on the end and let the heat up a little bit and then i'm going to put the solder on the iron and it will migrate right through the wire strands okay we're ready to start soldering our wires onto our led strip but before we do i want to show you a handy little tool and it's a heat sink clamp and you put it on your strip and what that does is when you're heating this it lets the heat go into your clamp and dissipate out and it protects your led chip on the back side now if you don't have one of those you can use a battery clamp and it has straight edges to it and it works pretty good and you can put that on there it has to go a little bit of an angle but do not put it on top of your chip because you may damage your chip there's another one it's an alligator clip and you might be tempted to use it but i wouldn't because it has sharp points and it could penetrate the insulation on your led strip another tip i want to show you is on the end of your strips sometimes you look at the pad and the solder on it looks black gray brown looks kind of nasty it doesn't look shiny and clean looking so i might suggest putting your clamp on it taking your soldering iron heating it up just take something like a razor knife and just scrape that surface off and then you can go back and apply your solder to it and this will give you a really good conductive joint okay we're ready to solder wires on now and i'm going to take some solder with my nice clean tip and my clamp on there and i'm going to put a drop solder onto each one of them it's like a half a ball then i'm going to take my positive lead and i'm going to heat the end of the ball up and get it hot and then i'm going to slide in with my wire and put the heat on top the wire and that's done same thing with the next one i'm gonna heat that little clean that tip again you can never clean it too many times put the heat on top that little ball and slide in with your wire and it's done here's another step that we do here at crown molding led lighting is we insulate more to make sure that you have a very good connection that it's well insulated we're taking a liquid tape and putting it on the end and we're sealing that up now we're going to put our shrink tube on the end of our led lighting strip but before we do i want to warn you about a few heating tools that you do not want to use this is a heat gun it's made to strip paint it's a thousand degrees fahrenheit if you put this on that strip and you keep it too long or get too close you will damage the chip and you will also melt the insulation another one that's not good to use is the propane torches this thing gets up to 1100 degrees and it will melt aluminum i would not use that on a lighting strip what we use is a 300 watt blower and it stays pretty cool and has a small airflow that comes out the end of it so what we're going to do is use that on our led lighting strip before we do we take and put a little color code on all of our strips here at crown molding led and this designates the length of the strip that we're making for our customer okay that has shrunk up very nicely and what i'm going to do now is just peel the adhesive covering the backing off of the back of it and then i'm going to slide my main shrink tube over the front of it and i'm just going to pinch it on the back and it'll stay into the adhesive that way and it's just right above the chip so we're going to heat that up now and as you can see it's not hot i put my finger on it and it made a very good tight seal on that strip now this is a professional way of soldering wires and insulating them on crown molding led lighting strips i hope this has helped you [Music] you

Channel: Crown Molding LED Lighting

Views: 99,446

Keywords: Crown Molding LED lights, Solder LED light strips, solder LED strip lights, solder wires to LED strips, LED strip lights, LED tape lights, LED wire connectors, How to solder wires to LED strips, Indirect crown molding LED lighting, Shrink tube for LED strips, Solder single color LED lights, How to cut and solder LED lighting, Best way to solder wires on to LED strips, How to connect solder LED strip lights, How to solder LED strip lights, how to solder LED tape lights

Id: 519YcuSsQ3U

Length: 11min 2sec (662 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020