On Tuesday, 5 April 2016 08:58:19 UTC+1, Brian Gaff wrote:
tabbypurr wrote in message
...
On Monday, 4 April 2016 17:29:50 UTC+1, T i m wrote:

So, assuming the first LED lamp I tried was also non-dimmable and
seems to work fine, what is it about 'dimmable' that makes them so

RC power supply

please. Would there be any issues using non-dimmable LEDs with a
dimmer like that if they actually seem to work ok or could it cause
the lamp to fail prematurely or worse?

immediate failure or fire due to severe overheating of the power supply
resistor.

I'd not expect there to be any problems, but it really does depend on
several things you probably cannot know from looking at the lamp or led.
For a start, the led may be a pretty crappy switch mode supply and may not
take that kindly to the weird waveform being fed to it by the
dimmer.,Whether it will cause a failure is hard to say. Personally I'd doubt
it but at some brightness's the system may hunt up and down or just refuse
to light without it being full on first.
There could be inductive components in the led that could but probably
won't blow up the dimmer.
I'd be tempted to try it with some well known leds and see what you get.
You cannot know how sophisticated or otherwise the dimmer in the lamp is of
course.
Brian

not one single point correct of course