SK6812: stuck on rainbow -even downloading effects - knightrider is not red it is in rainbow

OK I am a total newbie here and have been working on this for a few days. I finally broke it down to the basics removing HDMI/grabber/etc.

current setup:
SK6812 5m 300 LED strip
Raspberry PI 3 model B
OpenElec 8.0.4

The LEDs have their own power supply 300W 60A

The LEDs have a built in 3 pin female connector (power dat and ground) with two additional wires (power and ground) These two go into the power supply and I have cabled the dat directly to the RPI3 GPIO 18

I have installed hyperion and used hypercon to configure it.

When hyperion starts I get the rainbow for 3 seconds as expected. I can use the color wheel and phone app successfully with one exception. It is as if the rainbow values become default. As I move the color wheel all LEDs change color, but I maintain different colors. It is as if I have groups of 3 leds, blue red green- blue red green- ....

I downloaded some apps thinking I could change the effect to remove the rainbow, but even the knight rider effect works but it is not red, it is the rainbow lights moving back and forth.

The other oddity is that I seem to be limited to 225 LEDs.

I figure there is something simple here but HELP!!! I am not going to go further in my ambilight project until I get this worked out.

additional info:

// DEVICE CONFIGURATION
"device" :
{
"name" : "MyPi",
"type" : "ws281x",
"leds" : 300,
"colorOrder" : "grb"
},

Penfold42, my friend you are my hero. Yes they are RGBW and were connected to ground. I added the rgbw lines to my conf file and BAM I now have 300 working leds on the strip with Hyperion. Now I can move on to the grabber setup and am a huge step closer to having ambilight. THANK YOU!!