LED lighting has been revolutionizing the entire lighting industry greatly since its emergence, one of the question is “are all LED lights dimmable? “
To answer this question, we cannot give you a simple reply “yes” or “no”, we need to figure out more details and why it is that ?
LED is now a dominant lighting source in the world, which can be seen everywhere from industrial, commercial, residential, decorative, horticultural lighting to automative lighting, more controllability is added like the dimming, motion detection, to this light source.
Therefore, what makes LED dimmable possible ?
Well, it depends on the kind of driver we use. when we utilize a driver that can adjust the voltage of load, and there is a dimming wire coming out, which is connected to the dimming switch, then it be dimmable. Otherwise, it is non-dimmable.
Conclusion: some LED can be dimmable, some cannot
When you see the following LED lighting fixtures that have two dim wires (dim+ & dim-) coming out, they are dimmable
LED UFO high bay or linear high bay
If you want to use the dimmable function, you need layout the dimming wires and buy the 0-10V/1-10V dim switch(panel), connect them correctly according to the wiring diagram. If you don’t need, you can just cap the dim wires off.
Usually, there is the maximum wattage load for the switch panel, so please read its manual carefully and figure out how many switches you need to buy.
Why I should use dimmable fixture along with the emergency battery ?
This is because when you use the emergency battery along with the LED light, the light fixture is working under its normal power drive, in order to have part of light output, the driver should have the dimming function to make this happen. If the driver doesn’t support that, the battery would drive a 3-8 times load without warming up and cause the EM battery failure.
e.g. we usually use 30W UFO emergency battery to drive a 200W UFO high bay, and the UFO high bays is required dimmable, otherwise, the UFO EM battery would be burned.
This is like a 10 ton truck can carry and transport a 2 ton car easily, so you can imagine what would happen when using a 2 ton car to carry a 10 ton truck ? the car would be smashed under 10t truck, correct? My metaphor may be improper, but that can help you quickly understand what I mean.
Is there any dimmable bulb for E26/E39 lamp ?
We just mentioned earlier above, if there is no dimming wire out of the fixture, then it is not dimmable.
What about E26 E39 LED light bulb ? there is just one “L” end and “N” end point that is connected to the socket .
Well, Edison LED bulb also can be dimmable and non-dimmable. triac dimming is the most common, it is a kind of step dimming(e.g. 10%/50%/100%, three dim levels) under fixed input voltage(e.g. dim at 110V/120V, but cannot dim under wide voltage range 100-277V).
Also, it cannot dim continually from 10%-100%, this is the same case to the GU10 bulbs, PAR spotlight. It is controlled in a different way from the LED light fixture 0-10V/1-10V dimming.
