Addressable-LED Strip Power Considerations

Q: I have a 5m roll of 60/m WS2812B LEDs, what are the power requirements? 

A:

WS2812B LEDs are usually rated at 5V supply voltage and 60mA per LED(max output) 

On a 60LED/m density strip, this works out to a current requirement of about 3.6A/m and 18A max for 5m. 

This is a max value, however, with all LEDs on at max brightness. 

Depending on your use case, you can generally get away with about 1/3rd the max current. Which would be about 6A in this case. 

Read more about that here: Estimating Power Requirements

You can limit the current in your code or if using WLED you can limit the max brightness to bring the peak current value down if you like.

For powering the entire 5m at max brightness we have a 5V 18A PSU

With most use cases you can get away with less current, then you could use one or two of these 5V 4A PSUs giving you 4A or 8A respectively. 

This much current is a lot to run on a long length of LED strip. It can cause damage by heating or at the very least a colour shift in the far LEDs as the voltage drops. To solve this the best approach is to break your strip into segments and power each segment separately. 

For example, if you used the two 5V 4A PSUs, then the first PSU would power the first 2.5m of the strip and the second would power the last 2.5m 

Read more here on powering: Distributing Power

and here Power Topology

Note also that there are other LED strips which have different voltage requirements such as WS2815 which uses 12V supply and addressable COB LED strip which needs 24V.