Creating atmosphere with LED dimmers

Creating atmosphere with LED dimmers

Phase cutoff and phase on, may sound very technical. It is therefore a frequently asked question we note. Each LED bulb and LED dimmer has one of these labels. What does it entail? What is the difference? And what should you look out for?

What does phase cut and phase on actually mean?
Without getting too technical, these are both techniques on which lighting can be dimmed. So it is quite important to know well whether your lamp should be dimmed according to the phase cut or phase on principle. This is because this determines, among other things, which LED dimmer is suitable.

Phase cutting
Phase cutting is also called leading edge or indicated by the letters RL. With the phase-cut principle, you only have a 40% dimming range. Because of this, we recommend always going for a phase cut lamp including a dimmer.

Phase cutting was also used for dimming old-fashioned halogen or incandescent lamps. You also encounter it in LED from time to time. So pay close attention to this when buying lamps. In general, the bulk of the LED market does phase cut.

Phase cut-off
The best dimming technique. Phase cut-off is also called trailing edge or indicated by the letters RC. The advantage of dimmers using this technique is that they can usually use the full dimming range. Of course, this again depends on the quality of the dimmer. Moreover, it dims much more smoothly than phase cutting. Furthermore, it is also much quieter and you have practically 0% chance of buzzing in the dimmer.

What should you pay attention to?
It is very important that you know well what kind of LED bulbs you have and especially with what technology these bulbs dim. A lamp that needs to be dimmed with phase cut will not dim with a phase cut dimmer and vice versa. Fortunately, it doesn’t hurt either (you don’t break anything); it just doesn’t dim.

There are also phase-off and on-off dimmers. These are dimmers that have both modes and you can then switch very easily. The benefit of this is that you never have to worry about buying LED bulbs again. As long as they are dimmable.

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