For home decoration, LED strip lights are the best lights that are currently available. LED lighting is becoming more and more common in interior design. They last longer, use less energy and are less expensive to operate than other types of lighting. They also don’t heat up as much.
The need to move strip lights from one location to another does arise occasionally, though. Can you reuse LED lights? Yes, of course. To unplug and reinstall LED light strips, use a hairdryer to warm the adhesive backing. After that, you can carefully take it down from the wall without removing any paint. After that, mounting the light strip somewhere else is made possible by using a low-cost double-sided sticky backing.
At that point, the query of whether strip lights can be taken down and reused appears. We will respond to this question and provide examples of how to take off and reuse LED strip lights.
Related Post: Can You Cut LED Light Strips?
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Different Types Of Led Light Strips
- RGB LED strip
The RGB LED light strips to have a controller that allows you to select from the available colors using a small remote control. Since they are less adaptable than the other types, they perform best when used as accent lighting around borders or floor patterns. They do have many different shapes and intriguing designs; take a look at some of these.
One downside to this type is that it uses individual LEDs, which means every 3rd LED must be attached to the controller chip. But as long as they are placed correctly apart, there won’t be any issues or efficiency losses.
- SMD 5050 LED strip
Instead of using multiple smaller LEDs like RGB-controlled strips, these types of strips use a single large flat surface area per led. As a result, they are more effective, but on the downside, they are less flexible. This makes it harder to bend or twist them around corners. The wire is required to connect your strips to the power supply, which must be plugged into a socket specifically designed for this kind of strip.
- LED rope light
Most frequently, this kind of lighting is used as accent lighting and for decorating. This type is more “fluid-structured” than the other two types, but it also doesn’t use individual LEDs, making the rope more flexible and simpler to bend or twist into desired shapes or patterns. To ensure an even distance between each LED light, the ropes are typically cut off at regular intervals. These come with their own plug attached, so they can be connected directly to a power source.
Why Do We Remove LED Strip Lights From Wall?
Users frequently ask us how to remove led lights without peeling paint for various reasons. Here are a few such scenarios,
- It doesn’t work with your LED strip light.
- It’s falling from your LED strip light.
- Your LED strip light needs to be moved from one place to another.
- You’re relocating to a new home.
Can You Remove And Restick Led Strip Lights?
These LED strips can be taken off the wall without harming the paint or surrounding material. How? Use a hairdryer!
Set your hair dryer to the highest setting you can manage without burning yourself.) and start blowing hot air on the sticky side, moving the blow dryer back and forth evenly over its entire surface until you feel it slightly getting softer and slightly moist/tacky like glue does after pulling off some tape.
Once you have enough peeled off to grab onto with your fingers, carefully pull up on one corner and keep pulling in different places. Congratulations, you’ve just successfully and damage-free removed an LED strip from a wall!
Things To Consider Before Reuse LED strip Lights
Before removing any LEDs, make sure the power is completely off. If you don’t do this, the LED chips will eventually burn out (and most likely some of them will get damaged), making your LED strip useless.
All strips employ various connector types, but most frequently push or click-in connectors with a latch hold them all together. Be gentle when reinserting these to avoid breaking them, especially if they are small and delicate, as they are on LED rope lighting.
How To Remove LED Strip Lights?
In order to perfectly adhere to the wall, LED strip lights typically use a strong adhesive. As a result, you must be extremely careful when removing the LED strip lights from the wall to prevent the paint from chipping off. The steps to removing strip lights from a wall are listed below.
Step 1: To avoid receiving an electric shock, you must unplug the strip light. Despite having low voltage in general, LED lights can still shock you.
Step 2: The strip should be peeled off starting at one end. Until you reach the other end, slowly and evenly pull the strip. Peeling from the middle will damage both the strip and the wall paint.
Step 3: You must carefully loosen the strip in order to carefully peel it off from one end. The paint on the wall will also come off if you exert direct pressure and pull it off. As a result, you should use heat to make the adhesive loosen and a hair dryer to break the bond between the adhesive and the surface. Heat the strip light’s end with low to medium heat first, then increase the heat to high. The strip light must then be heated gradually before being peeled off.
Step 4: Take a strip end and pry it off with your nails. You can peel off with a coin or a knife instead of nails. You shouldn’t be afraid to do it even if a little of the wall paint comes off. If the adhesive is too strong, though, you’ll either have to leave the strip light in place or repaint the wall after you remove the light by peeling back some of the paint.
To prevent the adhesive from hardening once more, be sure to peel off and remove the LED strip light all at once.
How To Reuse LED Light Strips?
LED strips can be recycled in a variety of ways, but it largely depends on your intended use for them. Others cut the long strips into smaller pieces to create more usable space for lighting other objects, while some people use the smaller ones for decoration around their home or garden. You can always restick the LED strip somewhere else again by using super glue or another type of strong adhesive for this purpose.
Tips To Pack LED Strip Lights For Reusing
You’ll transport the ELD strip lights when you relocate from one apartment to another. But you must take care to prevent damage to them while moving, so you must pack them carefully for safe transportation.
Select a packing box based on the size of the LED strip light. If there are several LED strip lights, you should separate them into various groups so you can track them clearly when you reuse them.
Ideally, you should use the box that the LED strip lights were shipped in when you first purchased them. But since you are highly unlikely to have them, it is crucial to select a similar container to guarantee the security of the lights. To pack the container, you should use sealing tapes.
In order to protect the LED strip lights during transit from damage, you should also use bubble wrap and soft padding. The best way to protect the lights from impact and add padding is to use thermocouple. A strike against the container wall can break or damage the lights, so make sure they are not free to move around inside the container.
How Could We Restick LED Lights Again?
After that, it’s possible that you’ll want to reuse the LED lights. It must be re-adhered to the wall in order to accomplish this. The simplest method would be to use adhesive tape that has already been cut into stripes. This type of tape is double-sided with big pieces of paper on either side that you can peel off.
There are many different kinds available, so see where you can purchase some online or perhaps at your neighborhood hardware store or pharmacy department if they have anything comparable available.
There are other options though if you don’t have any ready-made adhesive strips. For example:
- You could use a glue gun, which is what I did when I recently tried this out on my own. The LED strip must be firmly pressed against the wall in order for it to adhere properly. It works quite well and is incredibly simple to apply evenly.
- Another option is superglue, but be VERY careful when applying this as not to get any of it on any other part of your strip other than where you want it to stick. Because you probably won’t be able to see exactly where the glue lands, this can be very challenging.
- In the end, I decided to use a glue gun for my most recent project after using double-sided tape twice. I didn’t have to apply any pressure or force to it, which made things much easier, and it worked great as well.
Conclusion
We have the freedom to experiment thanks to LED strip lights, which provide the house with soft illumination. If you want to reuse and repaint your LED light strips, the answer is: maybe. Depending on how big they are and what you intend to do with them specifically, If it’s a short strip of 5 or fewer LEDs for decoration, feel free to cut it up as many times as you like.
LED strip lights must be properly peeled off the wall using the technique we have already discussed if you want to reuse them. You should pack them carefully after peeling them off to prevent damage during transportation.
Then, using the technique we described, you must reattach them to the new wall. You shouldn’t have any problems reusing them if you correctly complete every step.
