Fading problem

[Rauco]

Ok, newbie question with probably a simple answer. I have spiral trees, some miniature, some LED and neither get a smooth fade or lower intensities. At 20% it's almost at full brightness, then below it's practically off. Any ideas?

[-klb-]

Have you tried phantom load? Search for snubbers, even though that is not what they are. For a quick test, try adding a string of mini lights to the channel to see if it helps. If not, there are some strings that just wont, and shouldn't be dimmed.

[Rauco]

Oh, I thought that was LED only. I'll give it a shot. Thanks

[Rauco]

So do I plug the snubbers into the incandescent channels as well as LED? I think as a test I may pull the lines I have LEDs on and see if there's a difference.

[EARLE W. TALLEY]

Rauco you may want to read this about fades
http://forums.lightorama.com/forum76/30435.html

[Rauco]

Thanks Earle, I will. I did recently update my software and have 16 trees on 8 channels (2 each). But each channel is either LED or incandescent, so no mixing of types.

I'm considering just pulling all 8 and hooking up one tree just to see if that works. If so I'll then add one at a time. Not really the time to be doing this, but this is my first year and my excitement is slowly turning to frustration! lol

[vvolf27]

I had to get rid of all fades before mine worked. But I was using all LEDs . Good luck.

[Ron Boyd]

Made a world of difference on my LED's. Simple, yet effective.

[Rauco]

Yeah, that's basically what I built. Problem is it's not just the LED's with the dimming issue. However, the snubbers on the LED's helped, or seemed to have helped the incandescents as well.

Do incandescents need snubbers? This is the real question at this point

[JBullard]

Rauco wrote:

Yeah, that's basically what I built. Problem is it's not just the LED's with the dimming issue. However, the snubbers on the LED's helped, or seemed to have helped the incandescents as well.

Do incandescents need snubbers? This is the real question at this point

Been doing this a long time, never heard of incandescents needing snubbers.

I also have over 700 strings of quality LEDs, never needed snubbers on them either,

[-klb-]

Rauco wrote:

Yeah, that's basically what I built. Problem is it's not just the LED's with the dimming issue. However, the snubbers on the LED's helped, or seemed to have helped the incandescents as well.

Do incandescents need snubbers? This is the real question at this point

Let's add a little more information here.. A controller with only incandescent load should not need any phantom load.

But, channels with only LED loads that are experiencing fading issues may cause all channels on the same controller to have fading issues at the same time, by messing up the zero crossing detection. This is not an issue with fading the incandescent bulbs, but rather a side effect of the LED strings not behaving well.


Do you have any tests with only the incandescent on, where the dimming is an issue for them?

[JBullard]

Do any of the LEDs have capacitors in the rectifier circuits ?

[Rauco]

I was wondering if the problem might bleed to other channels.

Later today I'll try to get as descriptive as I can with my set up. No worries. 16 channels wont take long to describe

As to the capacitors in the rectifier circuits.... uh...?

I'm a musician and computer programmer with enough knowledge to make him dangerous. Not sure how I'd know, but if you describe I'll see what I can find out.

Thanks for the help on this, guys. I'll get more info in a bit

[JBullard]

What brand LEDs are you using? Some designs use capacitors that won't dim worth a darn, because the capacitors will resist dimming.

[EARLE W. TALLEY]

JBullard wrote:

Rauco wrote:

Yeah, that's basically what I built. Problem is it's not just the LED's with the dimming issue. However, the snubbers on the LED's helped, or seemed to have helped the incandescents as well.

Do incandescents need snubbers? This is the real question at this point

Been doing this a long time, never heard of incandescents needing snubbers.

I also have over 700 strings of quality LEDs, never needed snubbers on them either,

Can you tell us who makes the quality LEDs that never need snubbers so the rest of us can buy them???

[JBullard]

I always buy from CDI

[Guest guest]

When I took some LED's out of a LED REPLACEABLE type string last year I found small capacitors just lying inside the sockets!:shock: They were held in by the LED leads and sat just under the LED plug that inserted into the socket.

They fell out if you held the socket upside down, some were wedged in and didn't fall out without a little persuasion (needle nose pliers).

After that I started looking into other strings I was having fading issues with and removed every LED looking for these capacitors and removed every single one of them. Once I got rid of the darn capacitors from inside the sockets, the string faded just fine. They seemed to be every other LED in some strings and in others, they were around every 5th LED in the string.

Not sure why these capacitors were in there, but it didn't seem to make a difference to how the string lit or voltages to each LED, just kept the string from fading up or down.

[David Rise]

I've got a green and white string that stopped dimming. Really weird that they dimmed at first and then stopped. The white stopped on the third test run, then the green stopped a about a week later.

Gonna check for those capacitors when I get time.

[JBullard]

All LED light strings are NOT created equally. Each mfg has to deal with patent issues, etc.

Plus, most LED mfg are marketing to the retail store consumer market, cheap price points, etc, so that Aunt Sally that just wants to throw a string of lights over a bush and plug them in will buy them.

In my opinion, using the controllers we use, it is normal to expect and see the retail store LEDs have problems when used for purposes that were NOT designed for.

So every year, people buy cheap LED retail strings to save money, then end up spending even more time and money buying extra parts and spending extra time trying to build snubbers and stuff in the hope that they can make a light string behave in a way that the LED string mfg never intended them to.

[EARLE W. TALLEY]

JBullard, do you have any of your 2011 videos up so we can see them?

Earle