The goal is to have a nice round, shiny lump of solder covering both pads with no indentations or points. With your soldering iron, start with the solder on the bottom pad and pull it up onto the top pad. Peel back some 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 solder pad. If you are using a cut strip you may only have half a pad available which makes it difficult to make a strong connection, so it’s better to sacrifice an LED and have a full pad for the bottom strip of your connection. The nice part about doing this is you will end up with a full pad to solder to. If you are joining two whole strips you will need to remove the factoring wiring by desoldering those wires. The bottom of these strips is generally enamel coated, so we’re going to make our connections on the top. The easiest strips to attach together are the IP-3-0 non-weatherproof strips. The real secret to soldering is using high quality, thin, flux core, leaded solder which melts easily and makes a strong malleable connection. The soldering iron I use is called a TS80 which costs around $100 and I love it, but honestly a $20 iron will work just fine. The second thing I’ll show you is how to wire additional power into your strips to prevent color inaccuracies due to voltage drop, and I’ll show you how to do it so that your wiring is completely waterproof and fits inside of a standard aluminum LED channel.įair warning, I’m going to show you the BEST way to do this which involves soldering. 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. What you may not know is that even though your LED strip comes in 5 meter sections, those 5 meter sections are actually made of 5x 1 meter sections and soldered together at the factory. The problem with that is it’s almost impossible to make the transition between two strips look seamless, and good luck fitting those connectors into a aluminum LED channel. If you want to join two strips together, the most common way to do that is to use the included wiring harnesses that come pre-soldered to the strips. Most LED strips these days come in 5 meter sections. Whether you’ve got traditional LED strips or individually addressable, 3, 4, or 5 wires, or IP-3-0, IP-6-5 or IP-6-7 waterproofing, I’ll show you the best way to splice your strips together and inject power for a long lasting, trouble-free, seamless installation. Today on the hookup I’m going to show you how to join LED strips like a pro.
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