A bit of a long shot...

I've got electronic dimmers (LightwaveRF) in my place. They are great, I can control all the lights form an app.

My spare bathroom has 4 x GU10 downlights and an extractor fan connected to one of the LightwaveRF dimmers.

I want to change to LED bulbs and whilst the LightwaveRF dimmers are fussy as far as LEDs go, I found some that 'should' work.

Yesterday I replaced the halogen bulbs with the new LEDs and the lights (inc. fan) ran fine but after 10 mins then the switch turned itself off. I didn't want to risk blowing the switch so I replaced one of the four with a halogen and it runs as it should.

My question(s) :

How is the fan affecting the LEDs behaviour?
and
Why does the 1 of 4 halogen put back in settle things down


Thanks in advance. Cheers, Greg
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2011 Vogue SE 4.4 with lots of toys in Stornaway

In short - load

A lot of the switches have a minimum load and LED's aren't enough - depends on the switch though.

Even 1 halogen will cover the minimum - but I would expect Lightwave to be OK with LED's.

Not sure on the fan though - they aren't usually compatible with dimmers of any sort.....

ok thanks Alistair.

My Lightwave switches are Generation 1, probably the latest ones are more LED compatible.

The fan - worked fine with the halogens. So I've have thought that cover the minimum load allowing me to run the 4 x LEDs.

Is it because LEDs are a digital load vs the fan and halogens. In other words black magic?? In the same way some inverters are pure sine wave vs square? Way out of my depth here!

.
. Cheers, Greg
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2011 Vogue SE 4.4 with lots of toys in Stornaway

Did you check the compatibility chart ?

The load is related to the resistance - which is related to the power - the LED's have a much lower resistance and the dimmer has trouble recognising that they are there.

It's a similar problem with LED lights on trailers/caravans - they cause the indicators on some cars (incl FFRR's) to flash too fast unless you add extra load/resistance.

I'm not an expert -just had similar issue - and don't know how the fan plays into things

Yep. We have a lamp with about 7 G4 bulbs in it. Replace them all with led's and it just flickers like mad.

Put 6 led's in and one halogen bulb and it's fine.

No expertise here...just pub talk ....

My understanding is that the traditional leading edge dimmers needed more load than most LEDs give with variable results, but the trailing edge dimmers (at higher cost) typically work well down to around a 10w load or even better. The lightwave RF claims its clever enough to do both leading and trailing edge as required...but I don't know if that's just their gen2 product or with the original gen 1 as well. Might be worth checking out a gen 2 switch? I've a number of Varilight Pro trailing edge dimmers around running LEDs and mostly they work very well. To be on the same switch, its likely that the fan is fed through a relay so the switch only supplies the trigger current which would be negligible. Mike - MPx

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