ADJ Dimmer Pack Freaking Out

[carsonld]

I am running an ETC expression. One line of dmx goes to the dimmer room and the other goes to the dimmer pack. I have an ADJ Dimmer pack set up that has four channels. I have four sets of LED fairy lights from amazon attached to the dimmers. When I plugged the leds into individual circuits, they would just flash on and off except for circuit 3 which would work properly. Now I plugged all four sets of fairly lighting into circuit four and now they are all flashing randomly. Thoughts? I am in the middle of tech and start a run at 8:30. ANY comments are appreciated. Im not sure what it could be at this point. Unless its just because they are cheap led christmas lights.

 

[dbaxter]

Try adding a dummy load at each channel. Something like a 60W bulb or really almost any light hanging about. The light load of those led lights has fooled many an inexpensive dimmer pack. We found a little led load cube that really works well. It's a mystery what's inside it. I wish I knew, but it does the job.

 

[TimMc]

A lot of LEDs do not like being powered from a dimmer, even if parked at 100%. Try the phantom load suggested by @dbaxter but if it doesn't work, find another way to switch power to the LED stings.

 

[FMEng]

Try adding a dummy load at each channel. Something like a 60W bulb or really almost any light hanging about. The light load of those led lights has fooled many an inexpensive dimmer pack. We found a little led load cube that really works well. It's a mystery what's inside it. I wish I knew, but it does the job.

Someone needs to buy a load cube and sacrifice it to find out what's inside.

 

[Amiers]

Laptop power supplies work well for this too if you don’t want to have a 60w lamp burning.

But yeah you shouldn’t be running LEDs off a dimmer pack. Especially shoebox dimmers. They are unreliable at best.

If you can get away with it see if you can make all channels hot and see if that helps your load but I doubt it.

 

[Chase P.]

Does your ADJ pack feature the ability to turn the channels into relay mode? Of course they're not true relays, just a 0/100% spike, but if three were set to dimmer, and channel #3 (that currently works as desired) was in relay mode, setting them all to relay might help.

Let us know what your solution is!

I do wish there were some cheaper DMX relay packs on the market. The OP is hardly the first nor the last person wanting to control some LEDs that don't like dimmers. I'm especially thinking of schools and show choirs who probably don't have the knowledge of nor the budget for the Fleenor and Indu relays. Those things absolutely have their place, but probably not in a cafe-gymnasi-torium.

 

[jad17555]

At a facility I work with, the manufacturer of the dimmers we had installed recommended a 3K 10 Watt resistor across each of the dimmer outputs to stabilize it for use with commercial dimmable LED bulbs. Before that we had to keep 1 incandescent bulb in the string or the string would flash on the way up or down. Doing the math, we probably could have gotten away with a c7 Christmas bulb. Try a small resistive load on the dimmer

 

[Joshua Schoeneck]

I have the exact same dimmer packs as you do and have used them with small LED lights. You can switch them from dimmer to switch mode, but it's not a true relay, so that won't help. The easy solution for me has been to plug a power strip that has a lighted switch into the pack and then plug the LEDs into that.

 

[carsonld]

Thanks, everyone! unfortunately they got cut even with the "We can get them to work properly". Now I know how to fix the problem

 

[JD]

Someone needs to buy a load cube and sacrifice it to find out what's inside.

Someone did! I forget what thread it is on, but someone bought one of those LED adapter cubes and dremmeled it apart! There is more in there than you would think!

EDIT: Found it! https://www.controlbooth.com/thread...-off-when-connected-to-dmx.38479/#post-333759