LED Lighting

We are making an apartment above our garage and I have wanted to fiddle with LED lighting for a while.  I have a friend, Deryl, who used LED strip lights under his cabinets and they look great.  After a few discussions with him, I decided to try it out.  Deryl used 31k lights bought from Amazon and of course, since he is an engineer and I am way smarter then he, I decided to use the 27k lights because they are 400 warmer than Deryls.  However, after putting them all up my wife and best friend's first words were, "Why are they green?"

27k LED lights from Amazon.  Don't get these.

Tip #1.  Use the 31k lights.  I am actually buying some 31k and 50k lights and hoping to give them a try.  More on that later.

This is what comes in the package.  There is a connector at one end (I didn't recognize it) and two bare black/red wires on the other end.  There is also some 3M tape on the bottom of the lights.  I hooked it up right away and they all seemed to work.  I have read places where sometimes some of the lights are out.  Might want to check.

Here is where they are going.  We have some rafters across an open ceiling and I am going to stick the lights on top of the rafters.

So how do we power all this?  Where, this is where Deryl is the expert.  His job has something to do with extra PC power supplies, so he gave me the skinny on those.  All computer power supplies have several different voltages and one of them is 12v.  Now these lights use 12v and 2 amps a piece and I am installing 3 sets of them so I need around 6 amps.  I went over to the local junk pc shop (I don't know how they stay in business) and bought a 300w Antec power supply for $10.  The picture below shows all the extra wires cut off.  This power supply has a 17amp 12v rail so I have plenty of power.  I would look around the web to figure out the wiring.  Also, I did not know that you have to jump a wire on the big connector (You can see the paperclip below) to get the power supply to work. This actually caused me $10 to figure out as I went and bought a different power supply to replace this one and they guy filled me in on the missing info.  So now I have an extra power supply and complete information.  Good Trade...

So I climbed the ladder and stuck the lights to the top of the rafters and wired them up. Below is a shot of  wire nuts I used.

 Below is the power supply hooked up.  On this (and maybe all) power supplies, the black and yellow wires are the 12volt ones.  LEDs have a specific +/- so be careful there.  I also used 18 gauge speaker wire for the runs to the lights.  They were short:

Finally, here is the final product.

Final Thoughts.  They look great but are not bright enough. The lights I used were 300 for 16 meters, but you can get 600 for 16 meters.  I however can add another strand of lights which is what I will do.  I think they look great....