LED lighting flicker rant

[DDY]

It literally makes me sick, nauseated.

It seems like every high-street business after that chic aesthetic, especially restaurants and bars, have converted to stupidly dim LED lamps which strobe and flicker.

The shop looks like it's lit by a pair of opposing LEDs on half-wave AC, setting a scene like I'm watching a rotoscope movie.

What's worse, no one else notices, not even when I complain about it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of LED lighting, 90% of my home lighting is LED. But poorly driven LED lighting has to stop

[peterb]

Sadly there are still a lot of dimmers designed for incandescent lighting in use, and they don't work well with LED lighting. Even dimmers designed for LED lamps ('trailing edge' dimmers) don't work very well at low lighting levels, although they are better.

The best way of dimming LEDs is by Pulse Wisdth Modulating them, but that generally means new control gear and possibly wiring, and the success of LEDs is that they are seen as a plug in replacement - which in many cases they are.

The big chains that have decent engineering support seem to be better at this though, it's shops doing it on the cheap that are less good.

[snedger]

My flat has ceiling recessing MR16 lighting and of course the minimum load of the transformers is too high for an LED bulb.
I asked an electrician for a quote on installing appropriate transformers and instead he quoted me for a whole unit replaceable solution i.e. when the bulb goes - after 30,000 hours, or more likely much sooner IMO - you just pull and replace a unit which is the bulb, transformer in one.
Decided that rebulbing the whole flat was too expensive in one go, so might just do the bathrooms and kitchens.

[peterb]

@ snedger, replacing the existing transformer for one with LEdS will cost around £10 for the transformer and about 15 minutes of your time, swapping at most 5 wires over. Just make sure you turn off the lighting (or other whatever they are connected to) first!

[Dashers]

Often you can set a minimum dim on the dimmer, so put it in just above the point they start flickering (if they do).

The best LED bulbs I have are the Philips 20W dimmables.