fairly OT : glass doors

As I opined 12 minutes ago ;-)

BTW: The SnapPower nightlights are proportional controlled, brightness goes down as the sun comes up.

to those who like that sort of thing >:-}

I was awakened this morning by flashing lights... spooked me a bit... then I realized it was fast moving clouds alternately allowing full sunlight, then blocking it. ...Jim Thompson

I wonder if illumination via the glass surface in a corner would work. That would save the drilling which one does not really want to do with such new stuff. Easy to try. Another solution would be illuminating the loo. That should impress the neighbors when they come visit.

Careful. By the time those clouds reach you guys they have gone across here and have been californicated.

Speed clouds?

Yep. Every few seconds. I first thought it was the wife flipping the light switch to wake me up ;-) ...Jim Thompson

The Western method would be sloshing a bucket of cold water across the pillow area. Saw it yesterday:

I've been fighting just to get dimmable LEDs to work with a dimmer. So far I've tried about eight configurations and they all pulsate at low settings.

I think the LEDs try to detect the dimmer phase angle, and modify their SMPS setting to draw the desired amount of power. There's obviously filter time constants in there. The modern dimmers are doing the same thing, and the control functions fight.

A series impedance is not likely to work very well.

Clifford Heath.

Just caught me :-( Heavily overcast at the grocery, but not raining... halfway to car, instant hail and wind so hard I could barely open umbrella :-( ...Jim Thompson

See? That's what I meant by sending over the californicated version of the storm. Meanwhile it's nice and sunny out here but cold.

I was lucky. Installed cheap E26 LED replacement bulbs from the club warehouse on a circuit that is fed by a 20+ year old dimmer from a hardware store -> worked. Until a couple of weeks ago where all five bulbs began to briefly cut out at random. Not sure if that's our local power grid or the dimmer going on the fritz. One of these days I'll find out when I have the time.

SMPS? In LED light bulbs? That would be like having gold-plated shafts on the inside of a car transmission.

Just try it out. It could result in noticeable 120Hz optical ripple but for those 2mins of a morning pee trip that might be acceptable.

The glass is basically invisible. A reflection will be deceptive.

Separate switches for fan and light, so I may be able to run the light dim. Cap across the switch maybe.

We squeeze most of the water out.

That one flickers quite badly. The ones I disected so far either contained just passives or sometimes a couple of TO92 devices (rest also all through-hole). Which surprised me because even my bicycle lights contain buck converters.

Maybe the regulatory folks made them do more now regarding PFC.

The problem is we always squeeze out 120-130%.

on a bicycle light you don't have a lot of voltage to play with and you need pretty good efficiency when running on batteries

They mostly run on 240V here. Here's the PCB inside our Atom branded ceiling LEDs. I can't find data for the IC, but NRD is a prefix used by NEC.

However it works, it's got a negative impedance region that the dimmers don't understand.

Clifford Heath.

Thattsa really ugly bathroom, not sure it can even be fixed.

Yes you could use a small capacitor. But put a low value R in series with it so the mains switch doesn't get hit by a huge current spike each time it closes. 330R would limit to the spike to 2A, well within the switch's rating I presume.

NT

Yes, it is remarkably efficient. It only gets warm when on 8W, at half power it stays cool even on a summer day when not riding fast. The mains powered LED lamps are efficient as well. We used to have a total of 150W in the living room chandelier which is lit at least 4h/day. Now less than 30W and nothing becomes hot anymore.

That could be an "overzealous" PFC in there but who knows. All our LED bulbs work nicely with all sorts of dimmers. Even one where I brought the lamp from Europe. A night stand light where as a kid I replaced the switch with a 230V dimmer that I bought in the 70's. It always ran fine on 120V. Recently I screwed in a LED replacement bulb, not really expecting much. Lo and behold it works better than ever. Here is the topper:

It now dims all the way down to a faint glow so it can act as a night light. There also is no longer a turn-on hysteresis where it flicked on only after turning the dimmer a bit up. All this was not possible with incendescents. Now I have a true seemless transition from completely dark to very faint light and then all the way up. Best of all this was with the cheapest LED bulbs in the store.