...don’t buy it I bought some off wish.com - couple of quid for a 5m reel...installed in an aluminium extrusion around the interior of the van ... tested it with a battery before bottling it all up and completing wiring ... worked and looked perfect ... Finished it all off ... had a clean up , told the wife to come and look how clever her husband was - flicked the switch and watched it fail with dramatic smokey effect section by section
Ive just ripped it all out ...maybe it wasn’t the led itself - more the ham fisted installer ( who should know better ) that squeezed ... pushed... forced the strip into the extrusion with the aid of a screwdriver
unlucky - most of the chinese stuff is the same and I've never really had any issues with it (whole kitchen is done out under the plinth)
One fun bit is the 12 volt LEDs have a series resistor with three LEDs. At 12 volts, you have about 3 volts dropped across the resistor, and 9 volts across the three LEDs. With 14 volts battery (solar charger, 13.8 volts float charge) there is now 5 volts dropped across the resistor. Because power is proportional to voltage squared there is now 25/9 times as much heat produced by the resistor so it smokes... I have some festoon bulbs with one dropper resistor and two parallel chains of LEDs. If I turn on the light with the sun shining (solar panel working) to test it the resistor gets so hot it desolders itself.
