Flickeing LED House lights

crockettwoodleaf 🎙️ · 9th February 2019

Hello, I am having an issue with our house lights. We put LED bulbs in and I can't get some to not flicker while they are dimmed.

We have Leviton N2408-CD dimmer packs and 3 of the circuits are for the house lights. We are contolling them with an ETC Smartfade. We have 11 LED bulbs on each circuit and 1 incandescent. When we dim we typically will have 1 LED per circuit flicker.

Any way to fix this with out totally redoing everything? Is it as simple as replacing the dimmer packs?

thanks!
Crockett

M.D.N.S. · 17th February 2019

Hi.

This can sadly be a common occurance with LED bulbs on regular dimmers. For the sake of troubleshooting, you could try to connect a larger tungsten lamp on the same cirquit as the LED bulbs, like a 300w fresnel, a parcan or similar lamps. The single incandescent bulb may not draw enough current away from the LEDs to act as sufficient ballast.

CKidd · 1st April 2023

I was introduced to this issue last year. We had strings of "yard lights" hung over the audience, as well as clusters of suspended bare-bulb fixtures house-right/left, and put LED lamps in all of them and immediately had the same issue. Our lighting designer had dealt with it before and had us install a "ghost load"...in this case, a single conventional lamp on each circuit (we used a small 11w outdoor lamp--it's a covered outdoor theater). INSTANTLY killed the flicker.

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