Dimmers & LEDs

Good grief!!! Don't you even know how to use Google!!! Here is the first of 151,000 hits on 'leading edge dimmer'.

PlainBill

** Rod ( of ESP ) has been testing high efficiency lighting products for some years now - beginning with my suggestion that the truth about CFLs was begging to be published somewhere on the net.

What is abundantly clear is that with very few exceptions, the products being offered to the public and industry are wholly incompatible with standard AC circuit protection methods and dimming equipment long used with incandescent lamps.

Egs

1. As little as 100 watts worth of CFLs or LED lights will regularly trip breakers installed in lighting circuits designs to accept 2000 watts. The tripping occurs at switch on due to unsuppressed surge spikes.

1. The same CFLs and LED lights cannot be successfully dimmed with common triac dimmers as installed in millions of premises and WORSE STILL must never be used in a circuit containing such a dimmer.

I doubt you will find this crucial information on any site other than ESP.

... Phil

wrote in message news:jcitbg$72a$ snipped-for-privacy@reader1.panix.com...

To be honest, I think I would live with the slight discolouring of the ceiling. A guy that I do a lot of work for, has recently changed all of the lighting in his retail shop, over to LEDs. These are not el cheapo Chinese ones, but expensive branded ones. The light is very bright - so much so that you can't actually look at them - but the quality of that light is dreadful. He first did the area behind the counter a few weeks ago. As you walked into the front of the shop, the area behind the counter looked like Santa's grotto. The overall light was dim, and of a very cold colour, despite these lamps supposedly being 'daylight'. When I pulled up outside the shop this week, I honestly thought that they were closed. He had done the rest of the shop, and now, it's like walking into a refrigerator. There are just two 'islands' of nice light left. One is the workshop area tucked away to one side right at the back, where Tony the engineer has flatly refused to have his linear flourescent removed, and the other is a display stand for some Bosch products, located half way down the shop. It has a number of small soft incandescent lamps in it. The owner is pleased about the reduction in his electricity costs to run these lamps, but I can't help feeling that he might just live to regret it, as what once appeared like a nice attractive store interior when you looked through the front window, now looks dim and uninviting.

So if you decide that you really want to do this, I would advise that you research exactly what you are going to buy to replace your easily dimmable light bulb, extremely carefully before doing it ...

Arfa

In the US, several companies (such as GE) sell CFLs that are specifically labelled as dimmable. This seems less related to the design of the circuitry that starts the lamp, than it is to the presence of return path that allows X10 and other signals to pass through the lamp.

I use mostly CFLs from Home Depot, which come on instantly, hit full brightness in about 30 seconds, and have an excellent color balance. (These are Consumer Reports' top-rated lamps, though I stumbled onto them -- there was a nearby Home Depot, and they were cheap -- before CU reviewed them.)

These are not labelled as dimmable, but the X10 system will dim them. (There are only about 8 or 9 steps from "max" before the lamp goes out.) There's a catch, however.

If you use a conventional X10 plug-in wall dimmer to dim them, the lamp will blink several times a second when you turn it off. The reason is that the dimmer pulses the line periodically to determine when you've cycled the power switch on the lamp itself. (This lets you turn on the lamp without using the X10 controller.) The dimmer notes the off/on change in current, and supplies full power. If you then command the dimmer to shut off the lamp, it will continue to pulse the line.

According to X10, you need to use an X10 wall-switch dimmer, which doesn't pulse the line. I haven't yet checked this.

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I have been powering CFLs controlled by X-10 only with 'appliance' modules to avoid possible accidental dimming. I found that they would switch off, but then turn back on, after a second or two similar to what William says for the dimmers. I resolved this on the older style module by cutting the sense lead from the output side. This does not, however, work on the newer appliance modules. I see similar issues with X-10 and outdoor LED Christmas lighting which can usually be resolved by plugging a spare 'wall wart' into the controlled output [in parallel with the LED load] to provide a somewhat linear load.

I have been testing a Philips LED 'light bulb' [9W] and I find it's operation, colour and brightness very comparable to the 60W lamp it replaced. It is also controlled by an unmodified 'new' X-10 module without any issues.

Neil S.

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Why not simply glue a piece of aluminum foil on the ceiling directly over the lamp and that will protect the ceiling from excessive heat if that is what you are worried about. Or, using a small piece of pipe drop the light bulb down inside the fixture so it is a little further from the ceiling.

You could also get a bezel and mount the fixture below that, the bezel would protect the ceiling from the heat, and whenever you move, you could remove the bezel and put the fixture back tight against the ceiling. If you did not paint the ceiling in the meantime, nothing would be visible that you had dropped down and then moved the fixture back up. Dimmers are mostly cheap and look for a resistive load. There are some dimmers made for cfls, you have to look hard to find them and pay $$$ when you buy them.

OK, so neither you nor Rod know what a 'leading edge dimmer' is, and aren't either smart or ambitious enough to look it up for yourself. I had a pretty good idea, and decided to do a little research before spouting nonsense. To bad you haven't done the same.

Point 1. A conventional circuit breaker would certainly be imune to any type of transients; a GFCI breaker should be immune to transients, but I will admit a poorly designed one might not be. Since an AFCI breaker is designed to detect and trip on transients, it should be obvious that a dimmer for LEDs would be likely to trip one.

Point 2. The incompatibility between conventional dimmers and CCFL / LED lighting is well known, documented on most packages of the lighting products, as well as the first few of the sources I found in by the search. Anyone who is surprised by this fact can only be described as 'willfully ignorant'.

Further, I am amused by the idea that someone purporting to be an expert would rely on anecdotal information on something critical to his area of expertise.

PlainBill

You may want to read up on spontaneous combustion of wood products exposed to long term heat. Ignition can occur below the normal burning point due to carbonization of the wood...common problem with wood stoves where they are too close to a wall.

You really need to fix that before you light your ceiling on fire!

John :-#(#

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1. Paint the ceiling white to reflect more of the IR heat.
2. Use a lower wattage light bulb.
3. Install a reflector
4. Purchase a proper light fixture.
5. Divide and conquer:

Don't inhale the halogen gases. Well, ok. Halogens runs very hot and will probably burn your house down.

I switched to LED lighting around my desk area at home. Ecosmart bright white A19 9 watts, 429 lumens at about $9/ea (cheap).

The color is rather yellowish. It's difficult to see the yellow color as the eye tend to correct for minor color aberrations. However, my digital camera does not lie.

The fluted white base is an aluminum heat sink. It gets quite hot.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

*+-Why not simply glue a piece of aluminum foil on the ceiling directly

That's exactly what my late dad did in 1999. That's what brought the problem to my attention.

Thanks to everyone for well considered answers.

- = - Vasos Panagiotopoulos, Columbia'81+, Reagan, Mozart, Pindus, BioStrategist

---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}--- [Homeland Security means private firearms not lazy obstructive guards] [Urb sprawl confounds terror] [Phooey on GUI: Windows for subprime Bimbos]

I was afraid of that. Unfortunately "leading edge dimmers" was in small print and not on the online ad before I ordered.

*+-Point 2. The incompatibility between conventional dimmers and CCFL / *+-LED lighting is well known, documented on most packages of the *+-lighting products, as well as the first few of the sources I found in *+-by the search. Anyone who is surprised by this fact can only be *+-described as 'willfully ignorant'.

- = - Vasos Panagiotopoulos, Columbia'81+, Reagan, Mozart, Pindus, BioStrategist

---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}--- [Homeland Security means private firearms not lazy obstructive guards] [Urb sprawl confounds terror] [Phooey on GUI: Windows for subprime Bimbos]

An aside on LEDs - they lead me to be more cluttered because I don't "see" as much mess. I have been using a lot of smaller LEDs since 2005 but I really don't trust CFLs.

I was alarmed to see many larger LEDs have built in fans. I asked at a trade show and was told the step-down transformer was the source of heat and that spozably the newer diode-based bulbs would be cooler.

- = - Vasos Panagiotopoulos, Columbia'81+, Reagan, Mozart, Pindus, BioStrategist

---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}--- [Homeland Security means private firearms not lazy obstructive guards] [Urb sprawl confounds terror] [Phooey on GUI: Windows for subprime Bimbos]

I was afraid of that. Unfortunately "leading edge dimmers" was in small

** Did it say you can or cannot use them ??

... Phil

Watt the hell.. heat from the aluminum base? That's Wasted energy, from a LED lamp, oh the horrors!

-- Cheers, WB .............

There are a few LED lamps with built in fans.

They're known to fail (if it moves, it breaks).

--
# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
# 831-336-2558
# http://802.11junk.com               jeffl@cruzio.com
# http://www.LearnByDestroying.com               AE6KS