Christmas Tree Lights and Standard Light Bulbs!

[rgs455returns]

Howdy,

 

One very cold more in January several years ago I notice my light bulbs in the garage would burn out more in the winter. You could hear the filament make a sound as the 120 volts would hit the 200 Watt bulb. So I decided to add a Insteon 2466DW dimmer control in the garage. Now I have the ISY set a very slow ramp rate warming bulb. To my amazement I have not replaced the bulb in the garage in over two years I started writing a date on the floodlights in the family room two years ago and I have not replace one of those in long time. SO the shock power to the bulb must shorten their life.

 

Each year I need to replace a fair number of burned out bulbs on the Christmas tree light strings. Well, I have added an Insteon to run the Christmas tree lights. Push the keypad button C and slow warming of lights worked like a charm!

 

I hope this tip helps you...

 

[Xathros]

Bill-

 

Nice idea. There are a number of threads about controlling holiday lights with Insteon on the board recently. None that I recall stated they were using dimmer modules.

 

It is fairly well known that ramping up and incandescent bulb can significantly extend its service life. This may have exactly the opposite effect on CFL and LED bulbs as many of the electronic driver circuits do not like to be dimmed and/or have problems with the chopped waveform output by the dimmer modules.

 

As for holiday lights, The majority of the LED strings I have seen don't have any circuitry to worry about so I don't think it would have any adverse effect on those and it should certainly help the incandescent strings in much the same way as your garage lights.

 

-Xathros