Lighting

We control all our lighting through Zigebee controller boxes and light strips. For light strips, we’ve used this for 12v, and this for 24v. They both have worked fine, and pull under 20 watts at high brightness with only a little bit cut off. The important thing is to get the “continuous” kind. We originally had the regular LED strips (not continuous), and tried to use railing and plexiglass “diffusers”. This is much easier, and we’ve had no trouble with the adhesive staying on which we found surprising. Do not get the kind with the “controller” built in, as they are much more expensive, and hard to find in “continuous”.

Concerning the controllers, they make variants for every protocol (Wifi, Bluetooth, Zigbee), and draw around 0.25 watts. The same 2 or 3 Chinese companies make models which are resold under different brands, so it doesn’t really matter which you choose. We started with this popular controller, but always ran into a faint “coil-whine” sound at high brightness, and a loud one at low brightness. That controller uses a “Pulse Width Modulated” frequency that is between 600 Hz - 8kHz depending on the setting. Even 8kHz (which is hard to tell if you’re using) is way too loud. At that high it shouldn’t be audible, so maybe we were just using the wrong setting. None of the reviews on Amazon seem to mention this, so might be worth trying your luck.

What we eventually ended up with is the MiBoxer variant that has a “PWM” frequency at 16 kHz. It had zero reviews on amazon, but creates no noise at even low brightnesses, and has screw terminals which are much better than the spring tabs. Again there are many different variants, so be sure to grab the model that supports your use case. We typically like Ikea products for the smart home (good Zigbee support), but the controllers we could find have an even lower “PWM” frequency.