I was changing out face plates when I noticed one of my dimmers was really hot. Significantly hotter than the rest. I tried reading the temperature from a meat thermometer and got around 120 degrees. The switch next to it was 86. The hot one was a black so I swapped it with a red to read the wattage used. The red gets just as hot. It shows it’s using power of 60. Is that watts or percentage? I also noticed if the lights are on full the dimmer runs nice and cool. It’s only hot when dimming. This circuit has 22 gu10 bulbs on it so it’s my most used wattage. They are all .3 watt leds. I’ve had this setup for years with no issues. It does buzz a bit too tho. Any ideas? I might just only use them at full brightness.
Thats watts.
What is the bulb make/model? This sounds like a bulb compatibility issue.
I had a switch that did this until I switched it to trailing edge mode
These are the bulbs
Can this be done on red or blacks?
I couldn’t find that specific bulb on the Philips site, but I am inclined to agree with @chris-b that trailing edge maybe the solution. Unless you can somehow find that exact bulb on Phillips site and with a specification that tells you to use one or the other, you won’t know until you try it.
When you say red or black I think you are referring to the Gen 2 switches. Unfortunately, the ability to switch to trailing edge was introduced with the Gen 3s.
When I bought them a few years ago they were called black series and red series. Latest is blue series right? Might be worth ordering one to try I suppose.
Well I ordered a blue series. We’ll see what happens.
The black series and red series that you are describing were both generation 2 dimmers (product code beginning with LZW). There was also a Gen 1 red dimmer that had a product code beginning with NZW.
The current red, blue, white series dimmers are generation 3 dimmers (product code begins with VZW/VZM/VTM). All should support trailing edge.
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Ok that’s good info. All of my current switches are LZ. I had no idea there were multipl generations of reds.
The new switch appears to be working! At first it was also running as hot as the old one but once I did the button trick to put it into trailing edge mode it’s now running completely cool! Hubitat still reports that its in leading edge tho. Is that normal? Either way its running cool so thank you!
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