It’s all about quality power.  If you’ve been in this hobby as long as we have you’ll find that cheap power supplies are more headache than they’re worth and can cause all sorts of strange problems.  Even worse, they can damage your equipment or shorten its life.  Do yourself a favor and spend the money now for quality and save yourself the headaches later.  It is a worthwhile investment.  You should run 12 gauge wire, at a minimum, from your power supply to the distribution boards and controllers.  Your needs will vary based on the number of lights and controllers you’re powering.  Each light will have its own maximum voltage rating.  We calculate our total power needs based on the number of lights in the Planning phase.

  • Mean Well RSP-500-12 –  These are the power supplies we use to power all of our pixels and controllers
  • Power Supply Cord – The standard three-prong cord connecting the AC portion of your power supply to the outlet
  • Power Distribution Boards – These boards allow us to break out 8 power ports per 2  (4 ports each) on the Mean Well RSP-500-12 in order to provide a termination point for power injections.  We install 2 of these Power Distribution Boards in each CG-1500 Case to provide 16 power injections per box
  • 45Watt 12V Power Supply – This is another DC power supply that we use for smaller sets of items.  We use them to power our House Floods
  • Power Injection T’s – These are what we use to inject power about every 100 pixels or so.  Your injection will depend on the type of lights and voltage you’re using.  Power injection is used to maintain a minimum voltage level to all of your lights otherwise your light will begin to dim or stop working all together.  Please read this page on Power Injection for more info.  The one portion of that page we don’t agree with is the statement regarding not letting +V from different power supplies connect at any point.  While we understand it is in there as a best practice to keep those of us whom are not power experts out of trouble…it isn’t necessary if injection is done at the right point.  Essentially, you cannot connect the +V from different power supplies directly to each other as they need balancing resistors in order to prevent the power supplies from being damaged by continuously trying to balance themselves.  Since we inject about every 100 pixels, the pixels themselves act as balancing resistors preventing damage to the power supplies…as stated here by AussiePhil.  We’ve been running this way for years without issue.  You can read more about what AussiePhil states about it and the entire article here.  We’ve spoken with him directly and he knows what he’s talking about…and it’s served us well!
  • Power Box – We had a 50AMP circuit run just for our show.  This box connects directly to it and splits out 6 different 20AMP L5-20R’s to connect to
  • 3 Way Power Adapters – These L5-20P’s connect to the power box mentioned above to break out our power into 3 way 5-15R’s