I’ve got a lot of dimmers. They are triac-based. Specifically, I’m using INSTEON products from SmartHome, Inc.
Are there CFL or LED bulbs that work with triac dimmers?
You can certainly dim LEDs by lowering the current, but I don’t know how household replacements are built. My guess is that it’d work with LEDs, but probably not compact fluorescents.
I believe they make dimable CFLs. The ballast has to be dimmable.
Halogen dims smoothly and quietly. I prefer them to incandescent where I have dimming switches because many incandescent lights buzz at certain points when they’re dimmed
This site seems to have what you are looking for: http://www.dimmablecfls.com/
Ok, but how functional are they? Do they dim linearly? Where’s the cutoff? Any reputable manufacturers? Anecdotally, I’ve heard that the GE “dimmable” CFLs don’t dim. They just work on a circuit that has a dimmer.
I bought 35 watt dimable CFLs to replace recessed 150 watt flood lights in my 1960 era house family room. They dim to a reasonable level and then turn off. Not as dim as incandecent bulbs will go. They also seem to take a minute or so to reach full brightness. The boss says she doesn’t like the way they make her sesame colored painted walls look. I’m not sure if that means I have to put the bulbs back in or paint the walls. Again.
We had a presentation by someone once who wanted to sell dimming switches for industrial flourescent lights (for a large office). You know, those 4-foot light-saber tubes.
The electrical engineer hit the roof when he found out and refused to allow them on the property. Apparently - flourescent lights require a minimum voltage (60V?) to work at all. What this dimmer did was chop the edges of the sine wave, leaving it at 110V but making it a narrower and narrower square wave. Narrow = less “on” time per 60-sec cycle = dimmer.
The unfortunate side effect would be to severely alter the phase of the current by doing this. Since older buildings tended to have a common neutral for many circuits, there was the risk of sending a huge current down the common neutral if all the pahse shifts worked out just right - can you say “fire”?
I bought two dimmable CFLs for my living room and dining room a few months ago. They were made by Phillips and were not cheap (UKP£10 each). They worked pretty well, but lasted for about 3 weeks before each failed in spectacular fashion. I mean spectacular too: scary loud electrical snapping/buzzing, coupled with blue flashes inside the coiled glass tube and an unholy stench that caused me to evacuate my wife and daughter to the back garden while I vented the house.
I’ve since replaced the dimmer switches with regular on/off types as we can no longer (easily) buy incandescent bulbs in the UK.
I have a dimmable CFL. It hasn’t blown up or failed in any spectacular or even non-spectacular fashion. It doesn’t dim nearly as well as the incadescent bulb; it has a much narrower range of dimming, and won’t dim at all below a certain threshold.
But of course they’re probably getting better all the time.
Dimming LEDs should work much better, though.
There are, I bought 60 bucks worth for my kitchen and to be honest with you they suck. We try to be green as much as possible, but have to draw the line at these lights. Waste of 60 bucks…
I recently purchased (then returned) Dimmable CFL spotlights from costco. Not only do they dim nowhere near as low as an incandescent, they buzzed like crazy unless they were on the high setting.
LED bulbs don’t normally run directly off the line voltage, but have a built-in supply for the bulb (or run on low-voltage systems). Putting a dimmer on the normal replacement ones would probably just function as an on-off switch. There may well be bulbs on the market designed to work with a dimmer of various types (simply by measuring the line voltage/duty cycle and proportionally adjusting the LED current).
The standard warning about using dimmers with halogen bulbs:
Halogen bulbs only maintain their long life by operating at high temperature, because of the reaction with the halogen that keeps the filament strong. Running them off a dimmer all the time may significantly decrease the bulb lifetime, negating the advantage of the halogen bulb over ‘regular’ incandescents. However, it is likely that running the bulb at full power every now and then may actually be sufficient to ‘repair’ the filament and extend the bulb’s lifetime.
I recently looked into dimmable CFLs. The Fed’s own website says they suck.
If that link doesnt’ work, go http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=cfls.pr_tips_cfls then right at the top is "My fixture has a Dimmer… " Click the “Learn more” link.
Isn’t that how ordinary dimmers for incandescent lights work?