led light strips power consuption

Question

I got one of these 5050 600 led light strips , according to the numbers it uses 12V at and 95 watts per 5 meters, that’s equal to 7.91 Amps, and they sent me a HUGE 10A power supply, everything seems nice and makes sense however I just measured the consumption of the whole 5 meters using a multimeter and it barely uses 2 amps, I'm just confused.

It just doesn’t make sense since the pcb does not have the normal 40mils per Amp rule to have 12 Amps running through the strip they would have to have at least 480mils, and those are HUGE tracks, measuring half of the width from the led strip I can confirm its 242mils which would limit the current to 6 amps but never 7.61.

There are some new 5630 led light strips those are supposed to pull up to 144W at 12V, being 12 Amps but those numbers don’t make sense anymore, someone please explain what’s going on here?

Short version :

The light strip is supposed to pull 7.9A and is only pulling 2A from the 10A power supply.

Answer 1

20 mA per series segment of 3 leds. But these are 5050 so three diodes per led. That's 60 per segment. But these are doubled up strips, like two strips in parallel, so that's 120 mA per segment. 600 leds divided by 6, that's 100 segments per 5 meter rolls. That's 20 per meter, 2.4 Amps per meter. Something is definitely off.

Edit. 2 Amps per 5 meters seems like a single color 3258 or other single diode chip type led strip. Those 60 led per Meter strip use twenty segments of 20mA per meter, so 0.4 A times 5 meters, 2 Amps. Make sure you got what you paid for...

Answer 2

From the data sheet you linked: "Working Current/meter: 0.35-0.4A" So 5 meters should be just about 2 amps. So I don't see a problem - the data sheet is wrong about power, but right about current. I suspect that the data sheet is claiming that the light output (1440 to 1560 lumens) is equivalent to a 95 watt incandescent. Since a pretty standard value is 1600 lumens for a 100 watt bulb, this seems about right.

Answer 3

The reason you're getting such low amperage is because you don't have the strip resupplied with voltage at every voltage drop point. If I'm getting this correctly you have the whole strip hooked up to one end resulting in the voltage dropping to probably somewhere around seven through nine volts on the other side. So if you re-inject the 12VDC power source every 1-2 ft you will see a higher current.