Dimmer With LED Light Fixtures

marksmithy69 wrote: ↑ Hey everyone. I am upgrading the lighting in my basement from old school light fixtures to LED flush mount fixtures. I have old school knob dimmers at the moment, and was wondering if I should upgrade my dimers to LED compatible dimmers? I've read that I might experience flickering if I use the old style dimmer. I guess I could just try it first, but I would prefer to order everything at once if I could. Thanks everyone.

Yes you should change over to LED rated dimmers if you want it to work properly. LED lighting can be finicky with dimmers in general. It’s not even a guarantee that all LED rated dimmers will work with all dimmable LED lights/fixtures. Many dimmer manuals will often list compatible LED fixtures that they have verified to be compatible. If you don’t change over now you’re likely to find compatibility problems and end up ordering them anyways, which you’ve said you don’t want to do.

marksmithy69 wrote: ↑ Hey everyone. I am upgrading the lighting in my basement from old school light fixtures to LED flush mount fixtures. I have old school knob dimmers at the moment, and was wondering if I should upgrade my dimers to LED compatible dimmers? I've read that I might experience flickering if I use the old style dimmer. I guess I could just try it first, but I would prefer to order everything at once if I could. Thanks everyone.

It doesn't hurt to change them old ones out.

I just swapped out a regular builder light fixture right outside of the laundry room with an LED Flushmount ... didn't change the rocker switch to a dimmer because won't need it to be dimmed ... it needs to be on max lighting.

Just bought two LED flushmount light fixtures from Costco this morning ... both are dimmable ... won't be changing the rocker switch in the bedrooms because would need them to be on max lighting.

Only need dimmers on fixtures that require dimming ...

To be safe order a new LED DIMMER SWITCH, seems like you want to go that way anyway and will not do any harm.

I have 8 dimmer switches in my house, only 2 gave me flickering issues so I changed them out to LED DIMMER SWITCHES, the remaining 6 are regular dimmer switches and work perfectly well.

100% change to dimmers that are specific for LED lighting.

Also, it may not be required, but I always find if you can get something with reverse phase dimming its better.

Forward phase dimming is generally the standard and is usually strictly worse than reverse phase dimming. I think in almost all my cases if there has been a hum or a flicker, its was due to a forward phase dimming switch. Reprograming the switch the reverse phase or changing it out solved all the problems.

A while back I installed dimmable LEDs on two old school rotary dimmers and an ikea floor lamp that was made before LED replacement bulbs came out with no issues. Some people are more sensitive to flicker than others and the same with the older dimmers.