Before doing any electrical wiring, turn off power at the source. Failure to do so may cause electrical shock, fire hazard, or death.
Zing Ear ZE-256 Wiring Diagram:
Before doing any electrical wiring, turn off power at the source. Failure to do so may cause electrical shock, fire hazard, or death.
I have a 5-bulb array of lights in my lamp, plugged into the 120v outlet. There are currently halogen bulbs in the lamp, each rated for 30w. There is a ZE-256 rotary dimmer switch that goes from off to dim to bright.
When I replaced the 30w 120v halogen bulbs with dim-able 3w 120 v LED bulbs, the LEDs don’t come on?
There are no other components in the system.
How can I make this work?
Or should I use a different dimmer switch?
Many thanks
Bob
I’m no expert in this matter, but, I think you are going to need to use a dimmer made especially for LED bulbs. The LEDs need a different circuitry compared to regular incandescent bulbs. Regular bulbs will work with any variable resistor placed into the circuitry (this dimmer basically switches a resistor of about 1.3 mega-ohms in or out of the circuitry as best as I can determine). LEDs will not turn on under these conditions. The special circuitry in LED dimmers provides a short surge of current/voltage which quickly decreases to the values seen in regular dimmers.
This switch inserts a diode in the circuit when in the LO (dim) setting. This reduces the power in half for incandescent lamps by providing energy only during one half of the cycle. However, this also means that the lamp is now powered with dc voltage (the diode only allows current in one direction). The regulators inside modern 115 Vac LED bulbs, even those that are dimmable, will usually not work with dc voltage. I would recommend using an LED dimmer, which will provide the LED bulbs with energy in pulses of variable duration (short for dimmed and long for full intensity) to regulate the brightness.