Blinking LED strips

A few years ago, I discovered that lighting up my 'home office' (which is actually...my kitchen) with ambient lighting in the dark corners helped avoid eyestrain late at night.  I've taken it as a requirement since then to be sure there is background lighting for ever screen in the house.  Watching video in darkness is bad for your eyes because of unnatural light changes.

Around one corner, above the refrigerator and near my electric vent, where it's always dark, I used an LED strip, placed on top of the sound absorbers.

So far, two of these LED strips have failed.  They work fine for about two years or so, and then something happens, and they start blinking.

I've always noticed that when the blinking starts, the power supply is quite warm.  Online sources often say you should check the power supply.  But none of the power supplies have gone bad.

Instead, what seems to happen is that the strip draws way more current than it is supposed to.  As it heats up, it draws more and more current.  That then forces the (fully working as intended) power supply to shut down for awhile.  About a second later the power supply fires up and tries again.  But the same thing happens.  So...blinking.

Now actually putting one of these LED strips on top of my (fire rated, acrylic) sound absorbers is a non-standard usage.  And I just lay them there without removing the paper backing.  Possibly because of that, they are generally running too warm and eventually develop an issue as described, a thermal runaway.

These lights have never given me problems actually attached to a TV or monitor.

Anyway, clearly strip lights are not good here.  What I've been successful with before are mini LED spotlights.  I have not needed to replace those, even though they are also installed on top of the refrigerator (but not on top of the sound absorbers).  I can aim two of them to fill in the two walls in the corner behind the refrigerator, eliminating the eye straining darkness.

Now, there are larger ambient light products that all look interesting.  But most of them suffer from a fundamental flaw.  They are operated by push button or app or remote control.  That's OK maybe if you have one.  But if you want the whole room lit up, you want to have them on the same power strip or whatever is needed to turn them all on and off at once.  But I also don't like the idea of having an app that powers them "all" because that presumed you bought "all" once and forever at the same time.  Instead, what organically happens is you keep adding to a growing set of lights to achieve the full desired effect.

Honestly, I just keep all my kitchen ambient lighting running all the time.  I probably shouldn't, though I think it's a trivial amount of spent electricity for making my life much more convenient. 

So generally the best idea is for ambient lighting to have no switch at all.

The mini LED spotlights have no switch at all, they plug into "USB" power and draw only 1 watt.  (It's best to say 1w or below so they don't get hot.)