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I have two sets of LED strips ready to be powered but I don t know how much power I am going to need. The strips are 5m, 12V, 14.4W/M with a DC input connector one each.
I have bought a cable splitter so I am able to connect both lights to the same power supply but I m not quite sure how much power they will need to work fully.
The power rating of the supply must be higher than the power rating of the load -- so based on the numbers, yes, this seems sensible.
However, the strip lights themselves will not support running that much current through them -- which means you can't just daisy-chain all the strips lights.
The voltage drop means you'll have dimmer LEDs.. and at some point they'll stop working entirely. To get around this, you should provide power to each strip. You can interconnect the data lines, but separate power wires should be run to each segment. How long the segments are really depends on how much voltage drop you can tolerate (how dim the LEDs at the end get).
You can use a voltage drop calculator (Google it) to figure out the size of wire you should use for the distance and power draw -- but expect to probably run 18 or 16awg wire from your power supply to the segment.
It may also make sense to use multiple smaller power supplies (with shorter runs), depending on your distances, room layout
You can view the catalogue on various electrical online store like talexo, shopelect etc.
