LED replacement bulbs

My recent brain fart moment was feeling environmental friendly and buying £24 worth of replacement LED bulbs for the living room ceiling light before remembering it was on a dimmer switch. Not a problem one might say if you keep it turned up but the bloody things flicker and change brightness after a few minutes and constantly need fiddling with. Going out shortly to buy whatever is still available of the incandescents they were intended to replace.

Chris

While it won't work on all LEDs I have got round the problem of using a mix of incandescent and LED bulbs on the same circuit. The average dimmer needs some form of load to operate correctly and this can be obtained from the incandescent lamps. My solution was to fit an even number of LED to incandescent lamps, we have 6 bulb ceiling fittings so it is 3 of each alternating. It has an interesting effect as when the lights are dimmed the incandescent lamps turn, as expected, much more red while the LEDs just dim while maintaining their colour, again as expected. The mix of lights tends to give a better less warm light when they are dimmed than incandescents on their own.

Cheers

MartinW

Chris

It may be that your leds can be dimmed if you have dimmable leds and the correct type of dimmer. This is one I bought recently:

Dimmer

specifically advertised for leds.

It may be the quality of the Chinese LEDs that causes the proble. We have a two lamp, reading lamp, meant for 60W E27 incandescent lamps. Because of the heat, I removed the shades and milled two 1/4" wide slots to improve ventilation.

Cheapie Chinese LEDS did not last more than a year in the fittings, (On for about 5 hours per evening) before they developed what looked like a 50 Hz flicker.. Lamps from better sources have lasted longer, so I got what I paid for!

Howard