Main > Main Forum
LEDWiz 5V power splitting......
<< < (4/4)
Dudeman:
Think about it like this. Volts don't kill, amps do. (THAT IS VERY OVER SIMPLIFIED)

A lightning bolt can be thousands of volts but very little amperage. That's why people can be struck and not die.

With the water idea:
Volts is the pressure of the water, amps is the flow of the water.

Green Giant:
The two of them are directly related to power, wattage.

Power=Volt x Current   --->  watts=volts x amps

The smaller the wire, the less power it can handle.  The thin wire you have can handle quite alot of voltage at really low current.  Since the led's require 3-4 volts and about .04 amps to light, they utilize .12-.16 watts.  The thin wires can maybe handle 1 or 2 watts.  So the five you are running to the ledwiz will pull .5-.6 watts, perfectly safe.

If you were to try and draw more than that the wire would heat up and start to melt the protective shielding around it and then possibly catch on fire until the connection was broken.

unclet:
Well I just wired up two sets of 4 LED lights using 20AWG wire for all power (5V) connections and the thin wire for the LED lights.   Works beautifully ....

Thanks for your help!
Dudeman:
Excellent! Can't wait to see the final product.
lanman31337:
Here's how I explain it to people.  Imagine you have a piece of pipe with water flowing through it.  Voltage is the pressure of the water, Amperage is the amount of water flowing thru the pipe.  Let's say you double the pressure of water, or voltage.  You would in fact cut in half the amount of amperage for the same amount of water flowing thru the pipe.  Or if you'd drop the voltage in half, you'd have to have double the size of pipe to get the amount of water flowing thru it to be the same.  If you look on units that can run on 120/240, you'll see something like 120 volts, 10 amp or 240 volts, 5 amp.  With LED lights, yours are 5 volt, but they draw milliamp.  You only need a very small wire to get them powered up, unless you're running across long distances, then you'd need a bigger gauge wire because of voltage drop and amperage increases.
Navigation
Message Index
Previous page

Go to full version