I already bought lights. Now I'm asking which dimmer to get, because they're so bright.

timmmay:

 

I already bought lights. Now I'm asking which dimmer to get, because they're so bright.

 

I have a clipsal push button one that looks like the cbus switches and it runs all I have thrown at it just fine.

I have a deta on a box with a power point too that I use to dim my hot melt glue gun down to get it not melting foamcore when I put glue on it. I put some of the plug in downlights on it, and it dimmed them with no flicker despite being below its rated minimum.

Found a clipsal one with push button and remote for $229. Found a standard one for about $55. Do they work better than the $30 ones from Miter Ten?

Found a PDL for the same price.

I dont think I paid anywhere near that much for the saturn push button dimmer. But who knows with the wholesalers discount structure. That electrical direct was quite pricy when I last compared with account prices at russels.

Does it matter which type of dimmer you get, or are they all the same? There are different brands, and leading/trailing edge dimmer modules.

Yeah, the light will say what it is dimmable with, and a universal dimmer will "work it out" but I have found that a mix of lamp types gives the worst outcome on any dimmer. Either matched e27 replacements or downlights, but not both. Pulled the dimmer out of the lounge since it was messing up so often if not at max brightness when turned on and other things. That was a geriatric HPM one that I can only assume was cheap triac one rather than transistors.

What would often happen is the downlights would be full brightness even tho it was turned on at about 3/4, then if you moved the dimmer start to flicker between fully on and quite dim. All while that was happening the pendants with dimmable e27's would be flickering up and down in brightness as the downlights were screwing around. Start at max and back it off and things behaved. Start at minimum and ramp it up and the e27's would come up reasonably uniform, and then the downlights would snap on at a certain point and the e27s would get a lot brighter at that point as well.

I bought the Philips 61028 LED down lights, and from memory the PDL 654 was recommended to me as a universal dimmer. It comes in both the rotary dial, and a push button.

In the end I only needed two down lights, so I never bought one to see if it works with them. I think I would have needed 3 of the down lights to guarantee it would work due to the minimum load.

PDL 654 looks about right, thanks. I'll check the documentation that came with them to see if it says what kind to use. I have 40W load of 4x10.5W LED, with identical drivers and LED modules, which is double the 20W minimum.

Solved! Thanks rscole, rich:)