Nostra Bella Casa : Patio Wall Conduit Routing

Since the patio retaining wall will be under construction soon, I needed to figure out how many conduits we need to get into the wall and how the LED lights will be connected.

I have made the equipment selections (12V water proof, LED strips and drivers) and put together a couple of sketches to guide the installation. http://www.flexfireleds.com/warm-white-ip68-waterproof-led-strip-light-reel/

The patio retaining wall is a total of about 51.5 linear feet on the inside, where the lights will be. The LEDs come in reels of 16.4'. So three reels will be slightly short of covering the entire wall. We have some corners we need to navigate which will be easiest done with flexible wire strips and connectors, so we will probably make up most of the difference with these.

http://www.elementalled.com/waterproof-solder-connector-pair.html

The product literature indicates that 32' of LEDs can be connected together without a voltage drop problem. The LEDs are about 48W / strip, so two strips is almost 100W of light. So we can connect two strips together and then run third strip in parallel to this to get a total circuit wattage of 150W, requiring a 200W driver. http://www.elementalled.com/12v-dimmable-driver.html

To minimize the number of conduits that need to be run in the wall, we can stub up between where the single strip and double strips are connected. As cheap insurance, in case we want to change this later, we can run another conduit to the rough location where the two strips will be connected in case we want to separate them at any time.

We want to be able to dim these lights because they may be quite bright at full output. This means we need drivers that are capable of dimming. We also want to have them switched at two locations so 3 way switches will also be required.

We also have 3 GFI receptacles that we want to put in the wall, but this is pretty simple.

The design sketches are shown below, complete with product numbers for purchasing, when it is time.