LED Bulbs and Dimmer Switch - Light from Bulbs Flickering Ask questions and find answers to many subjects relating to electrics and electrical work

[Sheffordian]

I'm hoping one or more experts on here can help me. I am gradually switching over to LED bulbs and all has gone well so far including one bulb on a dimmer switch. However, the lounge lighting unit consists 3 bulbs which were Philips Eco each at 18w (clear candle E14). I have replaced with 3 Ledlam 4 Watt LED warm white dimmable bulbs. Because of poor light and flickering I then changed the dimmer switch to a trailing edge dimmer switch but the lighting is still very erratic. The bulbs do not come on instantly and when they do come on they flicker like crazy except when at the lowest light setting. There is the dimmer switch at one point and a straight on/off at the other. The dimmer is two gang with the dining room light worked by one gang (the successful LED/dimmer) and the lounge light controlled (?) by the other. Frustrating the hell out of me and I was lucky enough to trip over this forum and hope that help is out there.

[ericmark]

A few things.

1) Dimming switches often have a minimum and well as maximum I have just removed one rated 40 - 250 W clearly be it leading or lagging that would be no good the an LED.

2) An LED will need the dimmer to switch. Using an electronic component to switch would need some leakage path. In industry we have items rated 4 - 20 mA and using this standard we done need a return (neutral) but there is no such standard with domestic.

In the main dimming switches for LED lamps need a neutral feed to them and in the main we don't have a neutral feed to a standard switch. In some cases the energy used by the control system exceeds that used by the bulb.

I have just removed the last of my 1980's dimming switches. They were a fad which has passed. With tungsten bulbs not only did the light reduce be also the colour temperature reduced giving a nice red glow. But with LED lamps the colour remains the same so far easier to just switch off some of the lights.

We use reading lamps. They are switched with a cheap Lidi pack of switches got four units from one remote two simple switches and two dimmer the latter can only be used with tungsten. Better is wall up lighter giving two levels of lighting.

Dimmers are so 1980's no longer a "Cool" method of controlling lights.