LED strip lights are available in various widths, lengths, and LED chip types, which make them versatile for home lighting and commercial lighting. What is the thinnest led light strip? What is the widest led light strip? Does the led strip width matter to me? What is the difference between the various strip widths?
How Wide Are LED Strip Lights?
The three common widths of led strip lights are 8mm, 10mm, and 12mm, which are also the three most widely used widths. However, the narrowest led strip is less than 8mm wide, and the PCB width of single color narrow led lights strips and narrow addressable led strips are only 3-6mm, which is thinner than your finger. LED strips can also be as wide as 28mm or even 120mm, multiple rows of LED lights are placed on the flexible circuit board, so they are also called multi-row led strip lights.
What Is The Thinnest LED Light Strip?
The thinnest LED light strip is the 2.7mm wide COB led strip with 3000K warm white, 4000K neutral white, or 6000K daylight white color.
COB is the chip on board technology, led lights are directly installed in the PCB board, so it can integrate more led lights in one strip, and achieve a dotless light effect.
And the LED lights are wrapped by a glue layer with a specific color temperature, which can realize the whole strip emission without extra PCB board exposed.
Are All LED Strip Lights The Same Width?
In order to adapt to different application needs, not all led strip lights have the same PCB width. In a narrow installation place, such as inside a cabinet, there is not enough space, and the wide led strip will be not easy to hide. If you want to add LED lighting in small crevices, narrow led light strips will work. It can be seen that the design of the led strip width often caters to the different needs of users.
How Wide Are 5050 LED Strip Lights?
5050 LED strip lights adopt 5050 SMD LEDs, 5050 SMD LED is 5mm by 5mm in size. The 5050 led lights can display white, red, green, blue, and other single colors or the RGB color.
5050 led strip lights are mostly 10mm wide, and 12mm 5050 led strips also exist. Multi-row 5050 led strip lights also exist, double-row 5050 led strip is 15mm wide, triple-row 5050 led strip is 32mm or 58mm wide, five rows 5050 led strip is 58mm wide, and eight rows 5050 led strip is 120mm wide.
A 5050 LED consumes 0.24 watts. Take the density of 60 lights per meter as an example, one meter 5050 LED strip consumes 14.4 watts, and five meters consume 72 watts. Then according to the power calculation rules, for a 16.4ft SMD 5050 led strip with 300 lights, we need a power supply with 72X1.2=86.4W or wattage that exceeds this number to drive.
What we also need to know is that the more LEDs on the light strip, the more energy is consumed, the higher the wattage of the power supply to drive the led strip, and the more expensive the cost naturally.
How Wide Are 3528 LED Strip Lights?
The 3528LED measures 3.5mm by 2.8mm, it consumes less energy than 5050 SMD LED, only 0.08 watts. One 16.4ft/5m 3528 led strip with 300 led lights total consumes 24 watts. And you need a 24X1.2=28.8W led power adapter to drive the led strip lighting. So we can get that the 3528 led strip is more energy-saving than the 5050 led strip under the same led density.
3528 led strip is best known as the brightest quad-row led strip, which is 28mm wide and comes in a variety of static colors (red, green, blue, yellow, and white) and dynamic RGB/RGBW colors.
The smallest 3528 led strip is 3.5 mm PCB width. Single row 3528 led strips are 8mm or 10mm wide. Double row 3528 led strip lights have a width of 15 mm. Triple row 3528 led strips are with a width of 20 mm.
How Wide Are 2835 LED Strip Lights?
There are single row led strips, double row led strips, triple row led strips, quad row led strips, and five rows led strips for the 2835 SMD LED lights. The thinnest 2835 led strip light is the 3.5mm wide IR strip for medical and thermal applications.
Among them, the 5mm and 6mm led strips are narrow led light strips, and more attention should be paid to the LED heating problem. You can add aluminum profile accessories to the narrow led strips to enhance LED heat dissipation and avoid damage to the light strip due to the heat accumulation.
The 2835 SMD LED is 2.8mm by 3.5mm in size, it consumes 0.2 watts. And one 16.5ft 2835 led strip light with 300 LEDs needs 60 watts, and you need a 60X1.2=72W DC power supply to run the strip. From this, we can know that on a led strip with 300 lights, the 5050 chip consumes the most energy, the 3528 consumes the least, and the 2835 LED is between the two.
| 2835 LED Strip | LED Strip Width |
| Single Row 2835 LED Strip | 5mm, 6mm, 8mm, 10mm |
| Double Row 2835 LED Strip | 15mm, 20mm |
| Triple Row 2835 LED Strip | 16mm, 22mm, 32mm |
| Quad Row 2835 LED Strip | 28mm, 30mm |
| Five Rows 2835 LED Strip | 64mm |
Does LED Strip Width Matter?
For a spacious installation place, the width of the led strip is not very important. In contrast, the LED density and brightness need your attention, because large places often require more brightness to illuminate the details. The LED strip width is only critical in places that are limited by width.
Another point is that if you want to add silicone led diffusers or aluminum led channels to your light strip to get a uniform and soft linear light, you need to consider whether their inner width matches your PCB width. You can’t pass a 12mm wide led strip through a 10mm inner wide silicone diffuser, nor can you fit it into a 10mm inner wide aluminum channel.
The widths of other led light strips are provided below for your reference.
| Types of LED Strip Lights | LED Strip Width |
| COB LED Strip | 2.7mm, 4mm, 5mm, 8mm, 10mm, 12mm, 16mm |
| 2110 LED Strip | 3mm, 4mm, 8mm, 10mm |
| 2216 LED Strip | 3mm, 4mm, 5mm, 10mm, 12mm |
| 3014 LED Strip | 3mm, 5mm, 8mm, 10mm |
| 5630 LED Strip | 10mm, 12mm, 15mm |
| 5730 LED Strip | 4mm, 10mm |