I am hoping to get my LED rope lights wired up in the near future, anyway. I have a controller that handles 3 strips of the LED lights. I've heard that you can try to daisy chain some of the strips together, but you run the risk that by the time you get to the end of the connected pieces, their may be power or color changing signal loss. So....
I am connecting the 3 long strips to their own set of 4-wire "ports" on the controller.
Now for the question:
If the normal wire used is 18 gauge for each (4-wire per "port"), can a person use two 24 gauge wires (IE: a single pair from Cat5 wire) for each of the 18 gauge runs?
Cat5 wire for those that don't know consists of 4 pairs (8 runs) of 24 gauge wire.
*) 18 gauge wire is 1.024mm thick
*) 24 gauge wire is 0.511mm thick
*) two 24 gauge wires is the same amount of copper as a single 1.022mm thick wire.
I have a spool of Cat5 wire at home were I could, for example, take the white/blue and blue/white pair, strip the ends, twist the ends together and use that, however I don't want to run the risk of messing anything up. I doubt that heat will be an issue since this is pretty low voltage stuff (12 volts total into the controller, 5 amps out total, that is split among 3 strips).
Would it work safely?
