LED Lights

[Rickbj]

I have seen some of the posts refer to LED lights. I was originally told that LEDs are either ON or OFF, and you can not dim or fade them. Is this true? All my lights are currently mini lights.



Thanks,

Rick

[George Simmons]

Depends on the lights. If you buy lights from the online vendors who supply a good percentage of us, they will all state whether the lights can be faded. If it doesn't say, assume they can't be. Before you invest heavily in any store brands test them yourself first. If they can't be faded they'll crap out very quickly.

[captainron19]

I have a combination of LED's from Home Depot, Dimmable LED C9s from Ledholidaylighting.com and Minis.

The Dimmable C9s from LedHolidaylighting.com dim beautifully. With the Home Depot Brand C6's it seems to be hit or miss. I have about 5 strands of 25 C7s on a tree and they dim fine. On my railing I have 2 of the large spools they sell (I think 200 lights each) and they did terrible at dimming. Luckily before I set my display up this with my first time with LOR I made about a half dozen of single c7 sockets with a male and a femal plug on each end. I screwed in 1 incandescent into the socket and placed that between the C7 LEDs that were not dimming and my LOR unit. After that they dimmed just fine.

[rmturner54]

Also do a search on led's , fading ramping etc....there is tons of reading on the subject on this forum and planet christmas. Good luck.

[captainron19]

Jus another note on this topic... I used a lot fo the phillips energy efficient minis this year ... 100 lights per strand that draw .2 amps per strand. I used them on my mega tree and had 3 strands per channel and they faded nicely.

I used the same lights on my railings using 1 or 2 strands per channel and they did not fade at all. I then placed a c7 incandescent inline for each of those channels and they still didnt fade. Weird and I cannot figure out why

[iresq]

One problem with using multiple strands of LED's on a single channel has to do with capacitive nature of LED lights. I won't pretend to know enough to try to explain, but in essence, you need to add additional load to these channels. This is often referred to a snubber or terminator. In my experience, I can run about 200 minis of any brand LED and have no issues with dimming/special effects. Once the strings get longer, so do the issues. I have a small tree wrapped with 7 strings per color of CDI 100 count C6's that dimmed like crap. A snubber per channel cleared up the issue 100%

The term terminator is a bit misleading as this load can go anyway in the channel.

Snubbers can be a single C7/9 light, a string of minis, or even a plug in room freshner (which is what I used this year).

A read through this thread will help to clarify. I purchased the same parts as the OP and will build snubbers for next year.

http://talk.planetchristmas.com/showthread.php?t=37562&highlight=snubber

[Guest Don Gillespie]

I have no problem with the leds as all mine are the C6 style leds knock on wood just bought 5000 more this morning

[Steven]

There is a lot of information here that could get confused. When we say "LED lights" we are referring to one of two different things:

1. Retro (replacement) bulbs. These are typically C-7. They often use capacitors as the "ballast" and can be destroyed by dimming.
   
   
2. LED strings. These are strings of 25, 35, 50, 100, and sometimes other numbers of bulbs. They almost always use resistors and thus will never be destroyed by dimming, although they may not dim properly.

If you have a retro LED bulb that is not labeled as "dimmable", then I would not even try to dim it unless you have a bunch and want to sacrifice one as a test. In this case, dim it slowly from 100% to 0%. As it dims, it will probably get brighter. If this is the case, then the excess heat from getting brighter will eventually destroy it.

On the other hand, if it dims properly, then it probably is dimmable after all, and is just not labeled as such.

[turbodt88]

I get my controllers tomorrow. I guess since I have already bought about 5,000 lights and have put them up.....I will be either happy or have learned an expensive lesson tomorrow.

I will need to read a lot more about this. Thanks for the info.

[papap]

Mine comes im tomorrow also. I have all the lights up. Hope all go well. LOL

[JBullard]

turbodt88 wrote:

I get my controllers tomorrow. I guess since I have already bought about 5,000 lights and have put them up.....I will be either happy or have learned an expensive lesson tomorrow.

I will need to read a lot more about this. Thanks for the info.

What kind of lights and where did you buy them?

What effects are in your sequences?

[drjosh]

I purchased 36 boxes of 70 count LED icicle lights from Target for about $10.00 a box. Got them all put up and ran my sequence and they did'nt fade at all. I then placed a 200 count strand of regular minis directly off the controllerthen plugged the LED's into that and fixed the problem.