When we upgraded the lighting in the sanctuary with dimmable LED bulbs we hit a snag, flickering lights. To stop the flickering, we replaced all the dimmers with new modern LED certified dimmers which actually made the problem worse. The electrician put in simple on-off switches until we could figure out something better.
Now we have. We now have non-flickering dimmers that work beautifully with our LED lights and just in time for Christmas. Why Christmas? Well, that is the one service at which we really use the dimming of the lights during our worship.
While I would not go so far as to call this a Christmas miracle, it was much harder than it should be so we want to share our solution. After trying numerous electricians and lighting retailers, we were finally put in touch with a senior engineer at Philips who recommended the dimmer that worked with our setup. Months of various failed attempts all changed in one day with a few emails and a trip to the local hardware store.
Our setup is 8 hanging fixtures, each with 6 Philips 10W L-Prize winning A19 lamps, on 4 switches (2 fixtures per switch).
We had tried several previous CFL/LED dimmer switches that did not work. One was the Lutron CFL/LED Dimmer CTCL-153PDH-WH which flickered at every setting level. A second was a Leviton vizia + #VPE04 which is an expensive ELV dimmer that should work with LEDs but requires 4 wires to work (2 hot, ground and neutral). We only had the two hot wires and ground available and rewiring the fixtures given the ceiling height is out of the question.
Now we are waiting for the lighting audit to come back for the Wiles Hall (our parish hall) where we have the remaining 9 @ 300W incandescent bulbs to replace with something more efficient.
Peace & Joy!
Jon
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