The BEST way to join LED strips with no gaps or seams + make waterproof power injection connections.

today on the hookup i'm going to show you how to join led strips like a pro whether you've got traditional led strips or individually addressable three four or five wires or ip30 ip65 or ip67 waterproofing i'll show you the best way to splice your strips together and inject power for long-lasting trouble-free seamless installations let's start with the why most led strips these days come in five meter sections if you want to join two strips together the most common way to do that is with the included wiring harnesses that come pre-soldered to the strips the problem is that it's almost impossible to make a transition between two strips look seamless and good luck fitting those connectors into an aluminum led channel what you may not know is that even though your led strip comes in five meter sections those five meter sections are actually made of five one meter sections that are soldered together at the factory so to make your led strip connections look seamless the first thing i'm going to show you is how to replicate those factory connections the second thing i'll show you is how to wire additional power into your strips to prevent color inaccuracies due to voltage drop this is called power injection and i'll show you how to do it so that your wiring is completely waterproof and fits inside of a standard aluminum led strip channel fair warning i'm going to show you the best way to do this which involves soldering the soldering iron that i use is called a ts80 and it costs around a hundred dollars and i love it but honestly a 20 iron will do just fine the real secret to soldering is using high quality thin flux core leaded solder which melts easily and makes a strong malleable connection this video is sponsored by pcbway.com if you're a tinkerer inventor or maker and you haven't checked out pcb way you are seriously missing out they obviously produce full featured printed circuit boards with a ton of different materials and options but now they offer basically everything you need to turn your ideas into a physical reality whether you need 3d printing injection molding cnc machining assembly or just plain old pcb manufacturing pcbway can do it all for highly competitive prices check out pcboa's awesome services using the link in the description to support this channel the easiest strips to attach together are the ip30 non-weatherproof strips the bottom of these strips is generally enamel coated so we're going to make our connections at the top if you're joining two hole strips you'll need to first remove the factory wiring by de-soldering those wires and the nice part about doing that is that you'll end up with a full pad to solder to if you're using a cut strip you may only have a half pad available which makes it really difficult to make a strong connection so it's better to sacrifice one led and have a full pad for the bottom strip for your connection peel back some of the adhesive and stick the bottom strip to something that won't be damaged by the heat of your soldering iron and then attach the top strip halfway onto the soldering pad with your soldering iron start with the solder on the bottom pad and pull it up onto the top pad the goal is to have a nice round shiny lump of solder covering both pads with no indentation or pointed areas once those connections are made the joint should be as strong as the rest of your led strip and shouldn't need any special considerations for power injection one of the things that i've learned after doing dozens of led projects is that there's no reason to inject power on the same point where you connected your two strips and doing so just provides another failure point at that location by moving the power injection point to a continuous solder pad you can focus on getting a strong solder joint without jeopardizing the existing connection when injecting power for individually addressable strips you'll need to solder an additional connection onto both the positive and ground wire while a traditional rgb or rgbw strip typically only needs additional power on the positive voltage connection since the ground is shared by each of the three other traces which is how those chips regulate their colors for my five to six inch power injection wire leads i use stranded copper wire because it's more flexible and it won't break if i need to bend it around inside the aluminum channel to get a good connection strip off about half a centimeter of insulation from each wire and then apply a nice bead of solder onto each pad and tin the wires that you just stripped then just apply a small amount of heat to the wire and the pad to get them to melt together neatly having these leads pre-soldered means that when i'm installing the strip i don't need to mess around with a soldering iron because i just use solder seal butt connectors to connect them to the actual power injection wires if you're curious about where and how often i inject power into my strips you can check out this video that i made on that subject to use the solder seal butt connectors just strip about a centimeter of each wire that you're connecting and then insert them into the opposite sides of the connector with the strip section of both wires crossing in the middle of the connector apply heat to the colored bands on either side of the strip those colored bands melt to create both a watertight seal and hold the wires in place then you just apply heat to the middle until you see the solder in the center section start to flow into the two wires and then you're all done the process is mostly the same for the ip65 strips except you'll need to first strip away the silicone covering before joining the strips and then do some additional waterproofing at the end to safely remove the silicone covering without damaging the strip you should use a pair of nippers to gently cut down from the top and then lift the covering away towards the cut end don't peel the silicone covering from the cut end because it can easily pull up the solder pads and make it impossible to connect those strips together next cut two 3 8 inch heat string sections that are the same size as the space in between your leds and slip them onto the led strip for later then you just follow the same instructions from before lay down the full copper pad on the bottom and the half copper pad on top of that and then pull the solder from the bottom pad onto the top pad until you have a nice smooth shiny connection with no indentations to waterproof your connections you'll fill the joint with hot glue at this point don't worry about getting full coverage or making it look nice you're just trying to get a good amount of glue into the joint once the glue is cooled slide the heat shrink tubing over the joint and use a lighter or heat gun to not only shrink the tubing but also melt the hot glue inside if everything goes well the hot glue will re-melt and ooze out of the sides of the tubing letting you know that you have a strong waterproof connection inside use the same process to create your power injection point on your next continuous set of solder pads use your nippers to remove a section of silicone and then apply a bead of solder to each pad then strip and tin your stranded wire pigtails and attach them to your strip then cover the whole joining glue like before and slide over your second section of heat shrink tubing last use a lighter to shrink that tubing and re-melt the glue for a nice waterproof tight seal after using your butt connectors you can see that this whole system fits easily inside of a standard aluminum channel and is just as waterproof as the original ip65 strips ip67 strips are my least favorite led strips to work with and in my experience they have the highest failure rate but if they are absolutely your only option it is possible to create a watertight seal when joining the strips the key is to cut the strip inside one led shorter than the outside tubing which will allow you to overlap the tubing after you finish the connections on the inside to pull the silicone tube back use a pair of needle nose pliers or use minimal force with your nippers to grab the strip and then slowly stretch the silicone tube backwards there's no fast way to do this so just take your time and make sure not to rip the tube the one nice thing about ip67 strips is that they're generally not enameled on the bottom of the strip which allows you to make a good soldered connection on both the top and bottom for a stronger connection this also means that you don't need a full solder pad on the bottom like in the previous joints since we're actually going to solder the bottom of the strip apply a bead of solder to the top side of the bottom strip and then lay the top strip over that and apply heat to the top solder pad you should feel the bottom solder melt and join the two pads together then follow the normal steps by applying a bead of solder to both the top and bottom pad until you have a nice smooth round connection after soldering the strips together begin the painstaking process of stretching one side of tubing over the other and after you're happy with the overlap which should be slightly larger than one centimeter stretch the tubing and insert your hot glue gun to fill the entire joint with hot glue on all sides in my experience there is no good way to do power injection on an ip67 strip and every attempt that i've made to have a wire coming out mid strip has resulted in a leak and subsequent strip failure honestly you should just avoid ip67 and ip68 strips whenever possible all the tools and connections that i used in this video are linked down in the description if you want to use the exact same stuff that i do but again as much as i love my ts80 soldering iron and i highly recommend it for its portability and ease of use any iron will work as long as it can get up to around 340 degrees celsius and just remember that high quality solder makes the biggest difference thank you so much to my awesome patrons over at patreon for your continued support on my channel if you're interested in supporting my channel please check out the links down in the description if you enjoyed this video please hit that thumbs up button and consider subscribing and as always thanks for watching the hookup you

Channel: The Hook Up

Views: 63,705

Keywords: home assistant, hassio, home automation, hass.io, smart home, diy, electronics, arduino, esp8266, nodemcu, wemos d1, automation

Id: WGgzWWrCIhY

Length: 9min 26sec (566 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021