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Do dimmers affect the life of LED? (self.homeimprovement)

submitted 1 year ago by Tandybaum to c/homeimprovement

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In my kitchen I have a flushmount light with an integrated led. I put in an LED dimmer on the switch and all is working well.

However, I had to replace it way sooner than I was expecting. Is there a possibly that the dimmer is hard on it?

I have the exact same one on another non-dimmer switch that is still running fine. That said the other one gets much less use so it could just be that.

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[–] nachom97 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don’t think standard dimmers for incandescent bulbs work well with LEDs. Dimming leds is usually done with pulse width modulation, or turning it off and on very very quickly.

Led bulbs have more components inside to adapt the old school ac current to whatever the LEDs need, you might be killing those components with the dimmer.

Only solution i know off would be using smart bulbs if you want to stick with LEDs, but id imagine theres other ways to go about it, i just dont know

[–] BombOmOm 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Off-the shelf non-smart LEDs are also a thing, they basically read the input voltage as the input for how dim you want them to be. Then adjust themselves as necessary to make less light (as you said, generally by pulsing very quickly). But, you do need ones that specifically say they are dimmable.

[–] Tandybaum 1 points 1 year ago

This was a LED specific dimmer