I bought some neat flood lamps for my kitchen recessed fixtures. They have a built in slider to select the color temperature from 4000 to 6900K. Plus another 3 way switch to select 65, 75 or 90 watt equivalent output. They did flicker on my existing dimmer so I had to get a new one.
You’re gonna be able to take some really cool looking shots of the food you make so you can post them here though.
Just imagining taking a pic of a bagel with cream cheese imaged at 6900K and 90 watt lighting so you can see every delicate cranny the cream cheese is stuffed into 
I’ll bet that LED/CF-compatible dimmer was rather expensive. Also, I learned the hard way yesterday that they can be easily fried by a short - they can blow up before the breaker, as opposed to the relatively robust single-pole single-throw toggle.
I just bought a desk lamp that lets me change the warmth and brightness in a multitude of ways.
To nitpick, though, light bulbs are not getting that much more complex. It’s the cheapness of small led lights allowing lamps to provide a variety of lighting with a complexity that incandescent bulb lamps were incapable of.
Which also means that every schlock manufacturer on Amazon could tout their six-buck lights that can span thousands of degrees of warmth and bend 600° in four dimensions and put the fact that they produce only six lumens deep into the fine print. Trade-offs, always trade-offs.
I already had what I though was a compatible dimmer but it didn’t work. You’re right, there are some expensive wall dimmers in the 50 dollar range. But I gambled on a 20 buck dimmer and it works.
Well done. When I saw the prices of dimmers I replaced mine with a $3 toggle - that particular circuit really doesn’t need the dimming feature, constant brightness will be fine!
The ones I got were < $15 each: https://www.homedepot.com/p/301350408
I’ve installed those and similarly cheap ones in many homes, with many bulbs, over the last decade or so.
They haven’t blown up… yet. If they do, at least it’ll be in a warm, comforting 3000k 300 lumen glow. Before the boom, anyway.
What happened to yours? What kind was it and how did it explode?
Our new (to use) house is all LED. I’ve managed to put dimmers on some, Other bulbs I want to change to a multi color LED. About half the recessed bulbs in the ceiling apear to be multi color, but you got to pull the entire fixture out to do it. I think. And while I like our 10 foot ceilings, that’s a lot of screwing around on a ladder.
Don’t they have those light bulb grabber things? That sort of look like apple pickers?
Totally different situation. To get these fixtures out to see if I can change the color, I’ve got to be on a ladder, remove the cover, and then remove four wood screws.
After removing the cover (you turn it clockwise to unscrew it, the bastards), I saw it was getting more complicated than I wanted, and don’t even know if it will work without replacing the entire fixture.
We have some other things to look at in this new house. Wiring up some 220v for electric car and stuff. An electrition should be able to look at these lights and just say, “Yup, or Nope”
Lumitron Diva DVCL-153P. High quality. I had added a couple of additional LED fixtures to an existing circuit and when I screwed the cover back onto the jbox I’d branched from the screw dug through the insulation on a three-wire cable. When I energized the circuit the lights didn’t even go on for an instant, just nothing (no smoke, no explosion, that was hyperbole).
I disconnected the new branch and the existing lights still didn’t go on, so I knew it was the switch. I even queried AI to verify and sure enough, many dimmers will fail before the circuit breaker trips. Not always fatally, but often.
I love being able to easily adjust the color temperature of the light bulb, but the color is still poor compared to incandescent bulbs. They’re better than they used to be. For awhile, I kept one incandescent bulb in the bathroom in a two-bulb fixture over the mirror, but it finally grew too dim and don’t have any more.
Did the LED have a high “color rendering index”? I’ve had a few 90+ CRI 2000k LEDs (much warmer than 2700k “warm white”) and those finally felt like how I remember incandescents being. Though it’s been so long I can’t be sure anymore…
There is a very old saying in electronics that a transistor will protect the fuse by blowing first.
Name does not check out! The entire field of electronics only goes back to the late 19th century, and transistors to 1947. How old can that saying be? Still true, and wryly funny.
Even the simple screw-in lightbulb has gone so high tech. I buy half a dozen or so at a time, and the package lasts me two or three years. Every time I go shopping for new ones, it seems that the technology has changed.
There’s probably more technology in an average light bulb now than there was in a whole mainframe just a few decades ago.
More failure modes, true, but also a heck of a lot more efficiency (in terms of watts to lumens).
Light bulbs today also last a whole lot longer than the simple incandescent ones of decades prior.
Total tangent…you reminded me of my movie theater days. I was the projectionist, and as one of my side duties I would change out any burned out ceiling bulbs in the theaters.
So I used this fifty foot long pole that had a head with 6 little suction cups on it. I would apply a bit of spit to the suction cups, and raise the whole thing into the air, jabbing it at the dead bulb, giving a quick tug test, and then I would unscrew the bulb.
About one in five times the suction cups would lose their grip somewhere along the journey and I would have to drop the pole and try to catch it, often unsuccessfully.