Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/01/08/great-deal-on-recessed-dimmabl.html
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I’ve got some “dimmable” LED lights… they aren’t.
I’d buy them again anyhow.
That’s so sixties! I want those for my den, with the shag carpet and entire mirror wall!
Where is the button to make them $5? On the product page or the checkout page?
We have these installed in our kitchen. They are dimmable and work well - with one caveat.
That being, they emit a substantial amount of RFI. So if you listen to old fashioned FM radio or watch OTA television nearby, expect interference.
After discovering this I opened up each fixture, and added a snap-on ferrite core over the wires. Unlike magnetic wrist and ankle bands, these actually help. This cut the interference by about 2/3.
Edit: these are ferrite beads, not cores. Oops.
One point - there are old dimmer controls, and there are new dimmer controls. The old ones, as well as some of the cheap ones that are still being sold are intended only for incandescent (aka filament) based lighting. The companies that make them don’t always make it easy to find out if the dimmer is intended to work with LEDs - I found this out the hard way.
One example is some of the dimmer controls that are illuminated. I bought one for our dining room, which has a chandelier with decorative LED bulbs. The trickle current that it uses to light up the control is strong enough to illuminate the entire chandelier… Just a little bit. You can only see it at night.
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Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. I bought a house with a seven foot ceiling in a family room. I am 6’5" and hit my head on the light fixture during the walk through, so I installed recessed lights in in 1996. Still there. There are now some very thin LED panels, but they look industrial.
Bought these exact lights, and one thing to note is they have the spring clips, so your “cans” have to have those matching clips inside. Mine used a friction fit design. I got them to work, but what a pain!
They do dim with a newer dimmer fine, down to about 40 %
The dimmer control relies on a small current through whatever lamp you connect to run the control itself. A LED or low-wattage incandescent lamp may not supply enough current to run the dimmer. There’s also the issue that LEDs have a non-linear brightness-to-voltage curve, and will likely go from half-bright to off with minimal dimming adjustment.
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