I need to light traveling show cases with no AC power available. How do I hook up LED flexible light strips to AA batteries. (I bought 20 led per foot reels and 40 led per foot reels. Single color, not RGB) Can't seem to find a AA or AAA battery holder to hook/solder LED lights to. Plenty of AC to DC converters, but not useful in my situation. Thought about buying battery operated 20 foot, LED string lights, discarding the string lights and using the battery holder contraption for my 5 foot section of LED light strips. Just don't know if that could harm the flexible light strips or give them enough power. Are there any setups like this I can buy?
Powering 5 foot section of LED flexible light strip with AA batteries
batteryled
Related Solutions
The power rating of the supply must be higher than the power rating of the load -- so based on the numbers, yes, this seems sensible.
However, the strip lights themselves will not support running that much current through them -- which means you can't just daisy-chain all the strips lights.
From https://www.pololu.com/product/2547:
- The 60 LED 1 m strip drew 3.0 A and had a voltage drop of 0.6 V.
- The 120 LED 2 m strip drew 4.7 A and had a voltage drop of 1.4 V.
The voltage drop means you'll have dimmer LEDs.. and at some point they'll stop working entirely. To get around this, you should provide power to each strip. You can interconnect the data lines, but separate power wires should be run to each segment. How long the segments are really depends on how much voltage drop you can tolerate (how dim the LEDs at the end get).
You can use a voltage drop calculator (Google it) to figure out the size of wire you should use for the distance and power draw -- but expect to probably run 18 or 16awg wire from your power supply to the segment.
It may also make sense to use multiple smaller power supplies (with shorter runs), depending on your distances, room layout, etc.
The more 'electronic' a power supply, the longer it takes to start up. I had this nuisance in my pantry, where I only need light for a few seconds, so I don't want to wait another few seconds every time. I also have a VERY high current demand from a lot of LEDs in total.
I used a sealed lead acid battery on a trickle charger, and a relays. Battery is on common. NO is connected to LEDs. NC to a trickle charger.
Yeah. I'll have to replace the battery when it goes out. Beats waiting for a power supply to ramp up.
Long term, I think I'm going to make a service grade (100-400A) 12/24/48v DC bus for the house, with capacitors for buffering.
You might try a very simple 120vAC to 12vAC transformer (assuming thats your LED's voltage) with a rectifier and capacitor in some enclosure. You're building electrics at that point, so test, and include fuses, etc.
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Best Answer
You can get any number of configurations of AA battery holders. Mouser Electronics, an online electronics distributor has a whole page of them in their catalogue at AA Cell Holders Page from types that can accommodate 1 cell all the way up to 10 cells. Here are a few representative pictures of the ones available.
These are available with solder tabs, wire pigtails or snap fitting connections.