How to Make Your Dimmable LED Lights With a Perfect Dimming Performance

Due to its unique advantages, the LED lights are used in more and more lighting transformation projects. Not only because it with a higher energy conversion efficiency, but also has a much longer service time. And after few years’ development, the dimmable LED lights are already as good to instead of the traditional dimmable lamps (some of them even with the color temperature adjustable function at the same time). All of these advantages of this new generation light are improving our life quality, and help us to save more!

A-Plus Lighting going to tell you how to control the dimmable LED lights to meet your customer's expectations,

Dimmable or dimming may sounds very simple, but in fact to make the LED lamp get a good & smooth dimming performance need consider and solve many influence factors/problems. We are going to show you the common dimming problems and corresponding phenomenon in following chart,

Common dimming problems of dimmable LED lights

The Dimming way of dimmable LED lamp is depends on its lighting source design and power supply. In general, the lighting source part in two categories, one is Only LED, and another one is LED in series connect with resistance (some light sources are designed as a module, which has an internal DC-DC converter, but this complex design module will not be discussed in this post).

For the only LED light source, the common dimming method is through adjust the amplitude of its input current, so the dimmable LED driver design should refer to this attribute. With a high quality dimmable power supply, your lighting fixture will achieve your dimming expectations perfectly, e.g. 1-10V, resistance, PWM dimmable driver (external design is easier and better than internal dimmable driver). And because dimmable LED lights are becoming increasingly popular, some dimmable drivers are also compatible TRIACT dimming method, which is designed as traditional incandescent and halogen lamps’ dimmer be installed on the wall.

But this kind power supply, which is through adjust the output current to dimming LED lights also has risk to get the Dead Travel problem. When driver is NOT in the full loaded, LED lamp may will not response to your dimming instruction, but under the full loaded state will work well.

And another kind light source – LEDs and resistances in series connection (just like the LED STRIP), strip light is a widely used constant voltage LED light, normally working with 12V/24VDC constant voltage power supply. And this property also makes strip light’s dimming application is a little bit difficult to achieve. But there still has a solution,

Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) output solution

When LED driver working in a full loaded, LED strip light with a perfect dimming performance, has no the Dead Travel problem, this is very surely. But actually, strip light be used in many difference kinds application, like advertising or decorative lighting, auxiliary lighting. In these applications, it is not easy to accurately estimate how long the strip light you will need. So the best solution is select a PWM dimmable driver, which with Pulse Width Modulation output, the LED light brightness will adjusted by the PWM driver’s dimming signal cyclic loading smoothly. When you are purchasing a PWM dimmable LED driver, please pay more attention on these key parameters - the FREQUENCY of dimming resolution and PWM output. Its dimming precision should low to 0.1% brightness adjustment, this is in order to meet LED strip light’s 8bit dimming resolution application requirement; and the frequency of PWM output need to be as high as possible, to prevent the light flashing problem, according to relevant technical research reports, this frequency at least need higher than 1.25kHz to reduce the visible ghosting flashing.

So the best strip light (LED light source and resistance in series connection) dimming solution is use the PWM dimmable driver. PWM dimmable LED power supply provided by MEANWELL covered from 16W to 600W, they are very good choice for constant voltage LED light dimming.

Learn more about dimmable LED light driver>

In this post we are talked about the current amplitude adjustment dimmable LED light driver and some common application problems of it, also introduced the pulse width modulation (PWM) dimmable LED power supply as a solution to help achieve the dimming function of constant voltage light. Wish all above data can help you! If you like it, please share it to help more people.