Odd Electrical Quirk

[Lin]

Inspired by another thread, I decided to put dimmers on three light switches.  I replace two to them, which worked fine, but the third one did not.  There were two dimmable LED bulbs in it and when the dimmer was off, one bulbs would blink about every second and the other bulb would blink with it every second time.  If the dimmer was turned on, it would light both bulbs okay but continued the blinking at the minimum setting.  I tried switching the wires, switching the dimmers, moving the power to a different source, and adding another bulb in the string (since the lowest bulb count for the working dimmers was three).  None of that worked, so I put the on/off switch back and that works fine.  What do you think is happening?

[robertglines1]

All dimmers DC? I have seen static elect light up led's   In wire bundle does power for led's or feed run along AC wiring? Had the blinking prob a few months ago and discovered the ac interference,By accident

[oltrunt]

We had a similar problem with led's in our house but only on circuits serviced by 2 or 3 way switches.  It was never quite possible to get the led's to turn completely off.  They would just go very dim.  I used a volt meter on the circuits and got a reading of about 35 volts at the controlled socket even when the switch was off.  I discovered that if I added a 7 watt bulb to the same circuit in series with the led's the phantom power dropped to zero and the led's (and 7 W bulb) went out as expected.  We have eight such circuits in the house and all behave the same way.  I got Edison to come out and check for a weak ground etc. but they give the system a clean bill of health.  We've been using the led's now for the past year and the house hasn't burned down so we just pretend we have a novel night light system.  Go figure???   Jack

[Lin]

No, these are AC dimmers, but this is AC lighting. It could be from picking up some current from an adjacent wire somewhere I suppose, but it does not happen with a standard on/off switch.  The dimmer is a slide type with its own built in on/off switch, and the blinking even happens when the switch is off.  I guess that there is something about the electronics of the dimmer itself that allows small burst of current.  Anyway, it's not really important that this set of lights be dimmable.

I hadn't thought of this before and therefore did not test it, but the dimmer has a separate ground wire.  Maybe hooking it up would do something although they are not connected on the other two working ones either.  I may look at that on a slow day.

[bevans6]

Some LED bulbs are not dimmable with standard dimmers, and need special LED dimmers. 

[Dave5Cs]

Lin had the same problem and yes they have to have the ground hooked to ground in that circuit. They dissipate the leftover energy on the ground wire. If you have the ones I have it is a Deco type Pad toggle touch on/pff with a little slider to the right side of the switch. You also have to adjust that slider one way or the other to get it to where the light will stop blinking and it will. It says in the instruction how to do it. It took me 30 minutes to figure it out.
Jack two of mine were on 3 way switches and did the same thing and it stopped finally.
Dave5Cs

[oltrunt]

Dave.  Before the place burned down--or after? Jack

[Dave5Cs]

OK so far but I always hesitate to say.