How To Solder LED Strips

For this tutorial, you’ll need a soldering iron and solder with flux, a heat gun, helping hands tool, professional multi and single conductor wire strippers, multi-conductor wire. Based on the LED type, you’ll be working with heat shrink tubing and multichannel LED controller and appropriate power supply and your LED strip of choice.

Guide

First, you need to go ahead and strip off about one-eighth of an inch of the insulation on the wire. Traditional wire strippers work great for two-conductor wire, but when you start getting into RGB and RGBW LEDs, a multi-conductor wire stripper will make the job go faster, but also keep your wires looking neat.

So after stripping back the jacket on the wire, you need to go ahead and tin the leads. So you’ll want to apply heat to the wire itself and then melt the solder into the wire.

Next, you’re going to go ahead and tin the solder pads on the LED strip. So at this point, you are now ready to solder the wires to the LED strip. But before you do that, make sure to slide your heat shrink tubing over the wire. If you start from the center out, it’s easier to manage what you’re doing.

When you’re soldering the wires to your LED strip, make sure to take note of which colors are soldered to each pad on the strip. This will be important later when you’re connecting the wires to your LED controller. So at this point, go ahead and slide your heat shrink tubing over the connection area and apply heat.

When you’re applying heat to the heat shrink, don’t use more heat than necessary. Excess heat can damage the diodes on the LED strips. Finally, wire up your LED strip to your controller to test it.

Testing

Next, go ahead and plug in your power adapter. Look like it’s working. Frequently, customers will ask us if we recommend using solderless LED connectors. Now, while they are convenient, we don’t recommend them as they’re not as reliable as traditional soldering, especially in critical use applications.

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