By doing so, the light intensity will decrease as well as the power consumption which leads to fewer costs. Another benefit of dimming down the light is increasing its life-time means fewer lamp replacements and so maintenance costs. Besides cutting down costs - something you can count on, there are other priceless benefits.
Check out the 2 nd part of the blog, about smart dimmers. There are different types of dimmers that one can find on the market:. Do you want to control them by dimming the brightness from min to max level or do you only need them to switch on and off?
In case you need your light only to go on or off, you can use a dimmable or non-dimmable bulb. But if you want to dim it, then only a dimmable bulb can be used. You should always stick to the facts written by bulb manufacturers. Basically, all incandescent and halogen lights can be dimmed. Long story short, the dimming range you might get on a light bulb depends on at least three things:.
It perfectly fits both use cases. Nowadays, it is quite common to find 3-step dimmable bulbs on the market. The whole story about these bulbs is actually very simple.
Besides the light bulb, nothing else needs to change. Shoot us an email! Or set up an appointment for a free estimate below. Photo by Reinaldo Kevin on Unsplash. Skip to content Dimmer switches are simple electronic devices that are used to control the brightness level of lighting.
What Does a Dimmer Switch Do? Advantages of Upgrading to Dimmer Switches. There are several advantages to installing dimmer switches in your home. Energy Savings. You can control the look and feel of any room.
You may want to dim the lights while watching TV, but turn them back up to read a book. Dining rooms, family room and bedrooms are also great places for lights with dimmers switches. With these old dimmers, a variable resistor was used. Variable resistors have a bit of resistive material, and a pair of contact arms, one stationary and one moving.
Total resistance is varied by manipulating the distance the electrical charge needs to travel through the resistive material. Energy is lost via heat as the charge works its way through the resistor. By , the founder of Lutron invents a dimmer that used a diode and autotransformer.
Not only did this save even more energy, it was also ideal for installation in a regular electrical wall box. The problem here is that so much energy is wasted simply to heat the resistor. A safety dimmer was patented in leading to less energy wastage and the modern dimmer switches you find today use a different approach.
Are you still asking the daunting question of, "how does a dimmer switch work? Diverting energy from the bulb into a resistor is not the best method of dimming lights. Modern resistors function by quickly switching the light circuit on then off.
Using this approach, the total amount of electricity traveling through the circuit is reduced. This switching cycle is based on the way household AC current alternating current fluctuates. AC current has a varying voltage polarity on a sine wave. A sine wave is a curve and with AC current, the voltage undulates between positive and negative. To strip that down even further, you can just think of the current changing direction.
With a dimmer switch, this regular sine wave or curve is chopped up deliberately. When the current changes direction, the light bulb circuit is automatically shut off. As soon as the voltage hikes back to a certain level again, the light circuit comes back on. Since the circuit is switched on for the bulk of the cycle, more energy per second is given to the light bulb. What about when the dimmer is set lower? Where in the past a rheostat redirected the flow of current, the knob or slider on a modern dimmer acts a variable resistor but performs as a signal rather than redirecting flow.
A TRIAC is a semiconductor device a bit like a transistor constructed from multiple layers of semiconductor material, N-type this has free electrons and P-type this has holes where these electrons can go.
The upper and lower terminal switch between being positively charged and negatively charged accordingly. The switching action is controlled by the voltage on the gate. The voltage on the gate is controlled by the variable resistor.
With normal voltage across the terminals and very little voltage on the gate, the TRIAC acts as an open switch conducting no electricity. If the TRIAC is to conduct electricity between the 2 terminals, it requires a boost in voltage on the gate. The triac that is used to perform forward Phase dimming, cannot be operated in the reverse-phase matter and so different electronics are used for reversed-phase dimming — typically a FET or an IGBT.
These electronics are comparable more expensive than a triac and their current ratings are typically lower. So if you use reverse phase dimming you will pay a premium and your load capacity will be somewhat lower, compared to the forward phase dimmer. I should mention here, that some electronic low voltage transformers have been modified, specifically to be compatible with forward phase dimmers.
The manufacturer of the elv transformer must state, that it is compatible with forward phase dimmers or an electronic transformer should always be paired with a reverse-phase dimmer. While phase control is still the primary dimming method, it is not the only method. So other methods of dimming became commercially available. All of which have carried forward in one form or another to LED dimming. The signal is used to communicate to what level the light output should be set and the ballast driver uses some mechanism beyond the scope of this article, to achieve that lighting level.
For this reason, I refer to dimmers that use these methods as indirect dimmers. A light source that includes indirect dimming capability will be looking for a variable control signal, separate from the power delivered, that power typically being switched on and off by the controlling dimmer, in addition to the variable control signal.
The first type of control signal I will discuss is the variable low voltage output — sometimes referred to as zero to ten dimming. Such a device will react to a control signal, that varies between 0 and 10 volts DC, to regulate the light output. If the control signal received is 10 volts, the device causes the light output, to go to its full-on value.
If the control signal received is zero volts, the device causes the light output to go to its minimum or off value. A control signal value of 5 volts, being at the midpoint of the control signal range would cause the light output, theoretically to go to the fifty percent output level.
And that goes between 0 and percent. That standard is actually the opposite of what you might expect. Meaning that if I were to actually apply zero percent of the time voltage, then the light output is actually going to be a hundred percent and reduce down linearly to 0 percent when we apply a hundred percent of the time the voltage — opposite of what you expect. With those light sources, if I apply a zero percent of the time the voltage, then I will get 0 light output.
A third and final method of analog indirect dimming uses a line voltage phase control waveform as a control signal. Such a device is characterized by a neutral conductor, a conductor for power switching, and a conductor for dimming control.
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