LED Strips wiring - various strips length to 2 drivers?

[Sydrek]

Hi all,
I got my place recently renovated with a cove light installed in my living room. The issue is that my contractor engaged with an electrician who didn't seem to know too much and got a bad result, so I'm looking at re-wiring by myself.
The cove is roughly 3 x 3.7m. I have 2 x 80W 12V drivers and 4 x 5m strips (12V) available.
The main challenge is that the electrical wiring was done to 4 input points in the cove that are not the 4 corners. I know the best would be to redo the electrical wiring, but i'm not very keen to push holes in my ceiling that was just finished and repainted a few weeks back!
After a few tests, I also realised that my strips require to be connected from both ends to have a good level of brightness across the whole length (could be due to poor quality of the drivers/strips?).
I'm looking at splitting the strips as per attached image and connect them to the 2 drivers according to available wiring points.
Can anyone advise if I have a chance to make this work properly?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Lucien Nunes]

It is probably not a good idea to power the two ends of any strip from separate drivers. This connects the two drivers in parallel, which might be OK but also might cause improper load sharing, depending on their design.

The reason you find the brightness uneven when a strip is fed from one end only, is the resistance of the conductor foils inside the strip. If these are bypassed by sufficiently large wires connecting the two ends together, this problem will be solved. Or if you can access the solder pads on the strips at their mid-points, you can achieve the same result by feeding them there. For the 5m strip, there might even be an advantage to looping together the two ends plus the middle. Is there room in the cove to add some good-sized wiring alongside the strip, e.g. 2.5mmsq or 14AWG, to connect together the ends of various strips and the pairs of existing supply cables?

If so, I would allocate the 5 and 1.7m to driver 1, adding the new parallel cable shown in green to link up the two existing supply cables (to minimise resistance) with both ends of both strips. Likewise the 3.5 and 3.2 to driver 2 with the parallel cable in blue

 

[Sydrek]

It is probably not a good idea to power the two ends of any strip from separate drivers. This connects the two drivers in parallel, which might be OK but also might cause improper load sharing, depending on their design.

The reason you find the brightness uneven when a strip is fed from one end only, is the resistance of the conductor foils inside the strip. If these are bypassed by sufficiently large wires connecting the two ends together, this problem will be solved. Or if you can access the solder pads on the strips at their mid-points, you can achieve the same result by feeding them there. For the 5m strip, there might even be an advantage to looping together the two ends plus the middle. Is there room in the cove to add some good-sized wiring alongside the strip, e.g. 2.5mmsq or 14AWG, to connect together the ends of various strips and the pairs of existing supply cables?

If so, I would allocate the 5 and 1.7m to driver 1, adding the new parallel cable shown in green to link up the two existing supply cables (to minimise resistance) with both ends of both strips. Likewise the 3.5 and 3.2 to driver 2 with the parallel cable in blue

Thanks, this is good suggestion! I wasn't really considering to add so much wiring inside the cove, as I'm worried i can't hide them too well, but it may still be my best option.