I may have shot myself in the foot a bit.
I completely retrofitted my house with LEDs when I bought it, and by that I mean I took incandescent bulbs out of the existing fixtures and screwed in LED bulbs. It really wasn't any more money to get the dimmable ones so I got dimmable ones in a slightly higher brightness than I needed figuring I would install dimmers. Most of my house was recessed cans with pars.
Now an electrician tells me that its not just about the dimmable bulbs, its a whole system. He says I need dimmable LED fixtures with a special ballast that has two additional wires; purple and grey.... but he also proved himself a little bit full of E36 M3 in other conversations.
I knew that LED retrofit bulbs had little ballasts in the base, and I also know that diodes don't respond to the typical voltage variation that an incanescent bulb does, so I assumed that dimmable LED bulbs had special ballasts that controlled the diodes' pulsewidth proportional to incoming voltage to make them dim. Was I incorrect?
Did I just shoot myself in the foot? I have a really bright house right now. Help Curtis with his swagger and get me some mood lighting.
I don't know, but I installed a bunch of light fixtures in my basement, put dimmable LED bulbs in them, and they've worked great for several years. Nothing special about the fixtures, but I think the rheostat I got said it was made for LEDs.
In reply to Curtis :
It sounds like your friend is a commercial electrician. The purple and grey wires are for 0-10v dimming, where the driver needs a 0-10v signal to control the dimming. That system is usually used for commercial fixtures, not residential. That is not used for screw in retrofit lamps, which are line voltage dimming if used in a line voltage fixture. There are also electronic low voltage dimmers for low voltage (usually MR16) lamps. A regular line voltage dimmer might work, depending on the lamps. A line voltage dimmer rated for LED lamps would be better, and they are cheap and readily available. As long as the lamps are well made and somewhat newer (early LED's could be very finicky with dimming) you shouldn't have any problem.
mtn
MegaDork
8/16/18 10:20 p.m.
Our bedroom has a dimmer. I put dimmable LEDs in there, normal socket and dimmer—I pulled out an incandescent bulb. They dim just fine.
In reply to Boost_Crazy :
sounds about right from what I know of household LEDs
Recently I put some dollar-store dimmable LEDs into disco-era dimmable wiring at home and they've been fine...
Boost_Crazy said:
In reply to Curtis :
It sounds like your friend is a commercial electrician. The purple and grey wires are for 0-10v dimming, where the driver needs a 0-10v signal to control the dimming. That system is usually used for commercial fixtures, not residential. That is not used for screw in retrofit lamps, which are line voltage dimming if used in a line voltage fixture. There are also electronic low voltage dimmers for low voltage (usually MR16) lamps. A regular line voltage dimmer might work, depending on the lamps. A line voltage dimmer rated for LED lamps would be better, and they are cheap and readily available. As long as the lamps are well made and somewhat newer (early LED's could be very finicky with dimming) you shouldn't have any problem.
He is a commercial electrician.
This is good news.
The main living area and kitchen are both on 3-way switches, so I would invest in a push button 3-way dimmer so they can talk to each other. The rest of the house is augmented with things like floor lamps, desk lamps, and other sources, so I may not put those on dimmers since I can light them artistically with other means. The main concern was kitchen and living room.
I was thinking something like this. Would that do the trick?
Yes, that is exactly what I am using.
I switched over to LED’s a few years ago but they would never fully turn off (you could only tell at nights. The primary reason appeared to be not having LED rated dimmers. Swapped out with these and they work fine.
Not entirely sure why the old switched would be designed to bleed voltage when off though.
In reply to aircooled :
Many of the dimmers I see these days come with a little trim pot or the like on the front. It lets you fine tune the operation of the dimmer.