Flickering LED lights

[Matt Marsh]

We have about 3 dozen of the Home Depot Commercial Electric 75w equivalent trim ring fixtures in the house and so far in about a month, two have failed so far. The failure mode is that they heat up and then begin strobing, then go out. Over all I'm pretty disappointed in the performance of these lights.

I'd be willing to bet that the drivers in these fixtures are the problem.

[Bob Grier]

Try doing what Steve P suggested - replace one bulb in the circuit with an incandescent bulb of equivalent lumens and color. That is what I did to curtail strobing in my 12 can light circuit in the kitchen. I tried adjusting the limit dimmer, moving the dimmer to a different location in the circuit (3-way), and even replacing the dimmer. Only thing that worked was installing an incandescent bulb in the circuit.

I have strip LEDs under the upper kitchen cabinets and they flicker sometimes at different dimmer settings or for no apparent reason. I can not so easily install an incandescent bulb in that circuit to stabilize the sensing. I suspect that the flicker is because of other circuits tied to the same breaker circuit but the flicker can usually be stopped by changing the amount of dimming.

[Chris Padilla]

Most of the control out there for LEDs to get dimming or fading (to start or stop) or flashing is via PWM--Pulse Width Modulation. You can Google and learn a little bit about it if you like.

[Jim Koepke]

replace one bulb in the circuit with an incandescent bulb of equivalent lumens and color.

Another problem is LEDs do not always draw enough current to keep the switch's electronics on, causing a misfire which is seen as flicker.

Out of all of the failures, only one was a catastrophic one, were the bulb literally blew apart from its base.

An incident of mine with a mis-wired capacitor blowing up in the very early hours still gives me cause to chuckle at times.

This makes me wonder if it could have been a capacitor that blew up in Matt's case. It may be the feedback from the capacitance of the LED lamps is tricking the switch's electronics into seeing no load for an instant or two, causing a failure to turn on, thus the flicker. The incandescent bulb provides a constant load thus no tricks to the switch's circuitry.

jtk

[Dave Cav]

I did try adding an incandescent bulb in the circuit earlier and it didn't make any difference, plus there's no mounting plate in the recessed cans to hang a PAR lamp from.

I have made progress. Home Depot had the 65 watt LED trims on clearance so I got two boxes of four and installed four in the office replacing the 75 watt (equivalent) trims. Little to no flickering now, so apparently the driver in the lower wattage lamps works better with the Lutron dimmer I have. I also got a Lutron Maestro dimmer which I'll try out tomorrow. The 65 watt trims are more appropriate for the smaller room and relatively low ceiling as well.