If you’re looking for a way to brighten up your living room or even your kitchen, Philips Hue’s Lights trips are an excellent option. When cutting the Lights trips, I needed to know precisely how many packs I’d need so that I could plan accordingly.
As far as I know, the ‘V4’ Lights trips can be used to cut them, but how can you connect and reuse a single pack? Before I installed smart lights in my kitchen, I wanted to learn more about this topic.
Only Philips Hue Lightstrip Plus V4 versions may be ‘officially’ re-attached after cutting (every 13′′/33cm). Third-party connections such as Litcessory’s may also be used.
Overview of Philips Hue Lights trips
Philips Hue’s smart LED light strips – the Hue Lightstrip line – was always a part of the future of LED lighting in the home.
It is possible to put them in a wide variety of locations, including:
- Behind the TV, to create some great mood lighting effects. To sync the light strips, you can use HueSync, although this depends on the light strip type and how you use your TV to play content.
- Underneath counters and shelves a kitchen, this is very important for creating a pleasant atmosphere.
- Around desks (such as computer desks) allow you to ‘set the mood’ of whatever you’re doing/watching—having fun with a desert-themed PC title? Lights trips should be set to a yellow-orange hue. Are you watching Frozen? Turn on the blue or white light strips.
- Around the ceiling, where there’s coving or cornices. Make a space stand out and give some wonderful illumination, particularly at night when you may wish to mimic sunset with subdued, yellow light.
- In the video below, you can see how Hue light strips may be utilized over a door:
There have been four major generations of the interior Lightstrip throughout the years, which Hue refers to as aversions. There is a “Lightstrip Plus” indoor version of the Lightstrip. Outdoor light strip and Hue Lightstrip Play Development over time models are also available, as is a type that stands while behind TV and mimics the screen’s hue.
All Hue light strips are fundamentally powered by being hooked into a wall socket, which I’ll go into more detail about later.
Different generation/versions of the Hue Lights trips
Hue light strips may be divided into three primary categories:
Philips Hue Lightstrip Plus, which may be used inside.
Philips Hue Outdoor Lightstrip, which is weatherproof to IP67 and may be installed outside.
Panasonic Hue Play Gradient Lightstrip is a new line of ‘behind-the-TV’ light strips released in September 2020.
Both the outdoor light strip and the Play Multicolor light strip are in their initial iteration. The interior Lightstrip versions, on the other hand, have gone through many iterations:
Released between 2012 and 2013: Hue Lightstrip
Lightstrip Plus V2 – launched in 2015, with 1,600 lumens, a significant upgrade over the previous light strip.
It was introduced in 2017 as a design update for the Hue Lightstrip Plus V3.
A new Hue Lightstrip Plus V4 will allow you to reuse cut components on some of the other Hue light strips when it launched in June 2020.
Only the indoor Plus V4 model is officially supported for cutting and re-assembly of Hue Lights trips, which are all flexible.
Since Hue light strips have always been popular, third-party solutions exist for some of the other models covered in the concluding section.
Bending Philips Hue Lights trips.
If your light strips aren’t laid out in a straight line, you’ll have to bend these at some point. As a result, they may round a nook and cranny among both two non – parallel surfaces (such as a wall or a street kitchen cabinet), traverse an oval-shaped surface, or even be run around portions of your workstation.
Because they’re constructed of a bendy rubber/silicone substance, Chromaticity Lights trips (or LED light strands in general) may be bent to a mild angle if desired.
But whenever you need to create a 90° angle bend, you have two basic choices to choose from:
Option 1: Bend the strip directly
As long as you can bend the strip without damaging it, it’s the most efficient way of doing this. Reclining where there have been solder connections, light diodes, or resistors is not recommended:
The ‘cut here’ indications on Hue Lights trips make it easy to bend the strips.
Because too many LEDs will be concentrated in one corner of the light strip, it is important to ensure that you already not bend the light strip so that it forms a hump in the corner.
Because it’s a 90-degree corner, the easiest method to bend this strip is 45 degrees in the opposite direction of what you’d like it bent. Then, bend it back in the opposite direction.
Option 2: buy a corner joint
It is possible to acquire a “corner connection” from a third party if the preceding procedure fails for whatever reason. The corner connectors are used to re-attach the two segments at the cut intervals.
Even though it’s a little unpleasant to buy additional connections, this approach may provide a better overall appearance than method 1.
Cutting then reusing/re-attaching Hue Lights trips
It’s likely that whenever you need to cut the Chromaticity Lights trips Plus because you have a break in your planned run, you’ll want to s the offcut at some point in the future.
If the Premium V4 model launched in mid-2020 permits reusing offcuts, then it’s a fantastic feature. Well…
As you can see, it’s not that easy. In the first place, the Chromaticity light strips can only be cut every 13′′ (33cm), which is a greater distance than almost all of their competitors:
Because of this, your main (useful) strip may be shorter in length than you expected – and the same is true for your offcut strip.
You may, however, only use the provided connection to connect your offcut to some other Lightstrip Plus V4 kit.
For the cut-off end to be joined to another kit, it must be powered and run via a ZigBee management (remember that the Hue light strips’ talks’ ZigBee, hence there must be a Hue Lightstrip controller). It’s a pity you can’t purchase the Hue controller on its own.
For the official cutting function of the V4 light strips, you’ll need to purchase two light strip packs, which will set you back a total of $150. A single pack of Hue Lights trips would be plenty for a 40-inch (1 meter) run, but the offcut couldn’t be utilized inside purchasing a second pack. This might become quite expensive, particularly if you want one 40-inch (1 meter) run, followed by a 20-inch (50cm) run (with a separate controller and power device).
Is there a way out of this situation? What about the V2/V3 light strips, then? Fortunately, Litcessory adapters allow you to cut and reuse offcuts. You may also save money by connecting a trimmed component to the Hue enhanced version kits and continuing on your way. Other businesses’ adapters can be used, but Litcessory’s are the most common, and you can get them from their website or Amazon, so I figured I’d talk about them here.
Using Litcessory to re-attach and split Philips Hue Lights trips
Lightstrip Plus and extension kits from Litcessory may be used to install connected light strips to the accompanying segments of my kitchen:
The entire length is a little less than a 3.7-meter (145-inch) run, but there is space for the dishwasher. Philips Hue Lights trips may be installed in two ways. I have two options:
Hue Lightstrip Plus kits (about $150 each) may be purchased for the left and right sides of the room.
a $20 Hue Lightstrip Plus Outgrowth kit expands the right-hand region run since the original kit is just 78 inches long (2m).
• This alternative might cost me up to $170 and result in a significant volume of garbage on the left-hand run, which is 24′′ long (60cm)
If it doesn’t work, I could always buy:
I can use a single Hue Lightstrip Plus kit (about $75) on the right side.
There will be a total of two Hue Lightstrip Plus extension kits (about $40 each) installed on each side to extend the run.
It costs $30 to buy two Litcessory “controllers to six-pin” Litcessory connections. It costs $15 for one Litcessory splitter. It costs $160 and saves the waste of Hue Lights trips, but three more connections mean more ‘waste’ in terms of resources.
One of the most difficult questions to answer. Neither of them is a good choice. Their blog article provides a thorough explanation when it comes to why I’d need three Litcessory connections. Still, in general, the Litcessory splitter must be linked to the Hue controller through a “controller to 6 pins.”
In this scenario, accessory connections aren’t worth it; I’d rather pay a few more dollars and purchase two independent Hue light sets. Of course, this means they’ll all operate independently, which is a fault in and of itself.
You may use Litcessory connections to get around this, which joins all Hue light strips to a common Hue controller. Only 33 foot/10 meters of Hue light strips (to a single controller) need to be used in total.
