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Can someone ELI5 why often lights set up with a dimmer also flicker? (mander.xyz)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

28 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Seen this in many houses, people upgrade their lighting setup and install a dimmer. Which works. But usually it also makes the lights flicker unintentionally, which is super annoying IMO.

Now, my understanding of electrical engineering is pretty rudimentary so I'd appreciate more something that explains the concept in a way that Cavewoman Mothra can understand rather than something technically accurate.

Thanks

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Thanks, some of this makes sense. But why is it then not constantly flickering? They usually flicker for, say, five seconds then they stop flickering for 20 then they flicker again and so on. Or they flicker for like a minute then they're fine for a couple more minutes, then back again flickering. The timings vary a lot from house to house.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

Building on their comment, perhaps the capacitor is building up energy and dissipates it every 20 seconds. Like beats in resonance when you hear a pulsing in the volume when a guitar plays a single note or chord.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

In my experience some brands of "dimmable" LED lights flicker and some do not. If you problems with flickering lights, try a different brand on that socket as an experiment. It might be the quality or type of components used.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No LED bulbs will work properly with triac based dimmers. "Dimmable LEDs" are horrible hacks that just about cling on for dear life, and many just won't work at all. Those dimmers are for incandescent bulbs.

The right way to dim an LED is pulse width modulation of the DC power, not chopping up the AC wave. That's what smart bulbs do because they have the dimming logic after the power supply is convertered from AC to DC in the bulb enclosure.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Well, this is anecdotal, but I bought an older home (circa 1990's) with dimmers already built in. We went through a number of LED bulbs and most flickered and some did not.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Those that worked worked more by luck than by design though. That's what I'm trying to say. Different dimmer, and you'll probably get different ones working.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Can you give me a few examples (links)/to what I should look for if I decide to go through the effort of swapping the old ones out?