Which Dimming Mode

Switches General Discussion
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1

Just about through with switching (haha pun) over all the lighting in my house. 10 gen 2 red dimmers, 5 gen 3 red dimmers, 3 Zooz ZEN77 switches for the outside lights. Also I splurged and got almost exclusively the Philips Ultra Def bulbs.
All three sets of switches seem to dim whatever lights I have fine. Though the toggle LED Tube lights does seem to have a slight hum. The 5 gen 3 switches I’d like to keep where they are as all are in 3-way configurations and I’d like to keep the added flexibility of the scene control that has over the gen 2. The gen 3 are showing leading edge, and as I understand the gen 2 is limited to leading edge and the Zooz switches are latest gen and are the triac. So I guess currently everything is using leading edge.

However: TIL the VZW31-SN actually has a selectable dimming mode to trailing edge. It’s hidden but can still be set. How would one know if that is the better mode? And how do you tell if it’s not? I haven’t noticed any flickering issues at even low settings (to a readjusted 1% level even ) especially with the Philips bulbs. But figured I should make sure. My house was built in 1999, and I guess I can be thankful as every single box I’ve installed into has had a neutral. So that fortunately isn’t an issue.

2

If they work, they will dim to a lower level. I can go to true 1% level with the lights I’ve tried in trailing edge but it was limited to an adjusted 30% with leading edge.

If they don’t, apparently there is bad flickering and noise and the switch gets hot.

3

Nice. I tried one of the gen 3 switches. The Philips UltraDef 100W equiv A19 bulbs would dim to about 12% unadjusted with the leading edge. In general this line of bulbs seems to do ok on leading edge at least. But on trailing edge they dim all the way down to 3%! I’m going to try it again this evening when it’s dark, as it’s too bright rn to really test it’s lowest dimming level. The switch’s temperature is staying stable. There’s no discernible noise, and the bulb hasn’t flickered.

I have a set of FEIT Chandelier bulbs I need to put in. While they at least don’t flicker constantly, or blick at a steady higher light output, when dimming they will randomly blink, and their dimming isn’t smooth at all at the lower end. I suspect they will work better on trailing edge, too. Thankfully they are destined for one of the gen 3 switches so I’ll have that option to pick.