wiring for power injection advice.

[Bartjet]

Hello everyone,

I am just getting into this hobby and am starting with rgb on my house. Following a design from a YouTube video, the plan is to put strip inside alluminum channels on the ridge lines of the house. Where I am running into trouble is with power injection wire. I am trying to make it clean and not have wires showing everywhere so I was going to run the power injection wires inside the channel with the led strip. But in following a guide I saw on here about power injection and using 14AWG wire, the outdoor 14/2 cable doesn't fit in the channel. So my curiosity is i have a lot of 14 guage THWN cable that will fit with the led strip in the alluminum channel, it is rated for wet conditions, but i am not sure if I can use this method legally and safely. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[AAH]

Welcome to ACL
As the lighting is low voltage there really isn't much in the way or legal requirements. 6 wire 14/0.2 security cable tends to be quite small diameter and is generally quite weather resistant. If you use 3 conductors for - and 3 for + you end up with about 1.32mm2 (approx 16AWG) per polarity. The cable is usually quite cheap because it has a lot lower insulation thickness because it is only low voltage rated. Alternately you could run 2 cables which would give you the equivalent of 14AWG per polarity.
Depending on which strip you use you will have dramatically different power requirements. Strip varies from about 10 pixels per metre in 12V strip at 5m lengths up to 144 pixels per metre in 5V at 3V per strip. In just about all cases once you go beyond 1 strip you need to power inject at each strip junction.

 

[Bartjet]

Ok, thank you. I was basically basing my power injection using 14AWG from Bill Porters xlights presentation on YouTube from November 2018. I am using ws2812b strip 5V 30 pixels/meter. The biggest reason for my question was that the outdoor landscape cable that he said to use doesn't fit inside the aluminum track with the led strip. So I was looking at the 14AWG THWN wire that I use for other projects and connections. Which fits great with the led strip, and THWN is rated for wet conditions, however, if you look up outdoor use the code says you can use it outdoors but it has to be inside of conduit. So I wanted to see if this idea would work.