good, long lasting,and reliable dimmer
Best dimmer I've ever used is a Variac. Won't fit in a wall box,
though.
The inline Triac circuits are inherently a bit crippled, without a good
ground reference. The available heat-sinking in a wall box is also
limited. So, unstable circuit configuration combined with poor
mechanical
design means it's possible to _never_ get what you'd like.
Remember that white LED's are still fluorescent lights, so they
will exhibit a half-life type of light falloff, too, along with color
shift. But they should be immune to the cold, and flickering issues
of gas-discharge fluros as they age.
I'm with the turn-on-more-lights crowd. We have two dimmers in the
house, besides the variac in the bedroom. The chandelier over the
former dining room table site has one, the flame-tip incandescent
bulbs can be set to a nice candle-like ambience, or else full on
for light. Regular incandescents tolerate this well. Halogens
don't like to be dimmed, the halogen cycle doesn't work unless
the quartz envelope is at full temperature.
The other dimmer is over where the desk used to be. It was
a central nightlight position in the house. Regular incandescent.
Could just use a small nightlight instead.
Mostly I dislike the dimmers, and now they're rarely used.
The variac gets use, it's extremely good at working down on
the dim less-than-a-candle end of things. We have a 100W
reading light a nd a string of Christmas lights on it. You
can run it up to read, or turn off that light and dim the string
down to the barely-visible nightlight zone. And it's quite,
no filament buzzing at low light levels. I never have it set
at 100%, the bulb is yellower and lasts a _lot_ longer down at
80% or so.
-- Jim
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