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UV wire for halo lettering?
Hi All,
Just a quick question on the type of wire people use for connecting halo lettering.
I recently fitted a job for another sign company who had outsourced the production of the letters & then asked me to do the fitting.
I’ve only done a couple of jobs with this sort of lettering before but it usually seems to be fairly straight forward.
There were various issues with the lettering when it arrived including a distinct lack of wire to connect them up. Basically all I had was approx 1" of the wire at the end of the led run. So I had to purchase some wire to extend these so I had enough to feed through the granite fascia & join to the loop wire. This I did with 1mm cable from a motor factors.
I used crimp & heat shrink connectors to ensure a water tight durable connection & proceeded with the installation.There is approx 20-30mm of wire exposed between the rear of the letters & the fascia.
I was asked the question by someone " is the wire UV stable?" I had never even considered this & to be honest didn’t even know if such a thing existed. I double checked with the motor factors & as I suspected found that the wire I had used was not.
I can’t imagine that this will be an issue, especially given the location being North West Ireland where the climate seems to be mainly under water & UV is a rare phenomenon!! 😀 Hence my main consideration to make sure the connections were watertight.
At this stage it’s really too late to change & I guess I’ll have to keep my fingers crossed.
I’d just be interested to know what others use & any long term experiences with either success or failure.
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1 Reply
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I wouldn’t worry too much about it. It’ll take nigh on 10 years in this country to degrade the PVC round a cable so far that it causes issues. It might go a bit brittle but given that it’ll only be carrying 12v – or maybe 24v in a high power LED setup it’s not going to be any kind of safety hazard or voltage drop.
In my experience, the average LED installation only seems to last 5 years before they start to suffer failures anyway – whether the modules’ output has deteriorated / LED strip fails / transformer goes.
Dave
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