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I have seen the light — 3 Comments

  1. If you find an electrician, could you ask him to pop round here and mend the electric vent in our downstairs loo please?

    I’ll pay him the going rate of course!

    Our outside light is solar powered, so when Lily goes out for a late-night tom tit, it blazes away for just enough time for me to step in said poo the next morning…

  2. We have 2 wall lights, only a few feet apart above the settee they are fed from a fused spur on the power circuit. Shortly after fitting LED bulbs one started to flicker. I replaced the bulb and it still flickered. I swapped the bulbs, the same light flickered. So I replaced the entire light fitting, it still flickered. I replaced the bulb again, but with a different brand of bulb. Success! I eventually decided that any two bulbs from the original pack could not be put on a common feed, whenever they were one would flicker. Electronic witchcraft in the LED power circuits?

  3. You might think you have separate circuits but they will all be commoned / joined at the other, input, side of your main fuse / circuit breaker box.
    You, a country boy, will also be at the far end of a long mains feed from electricity supplier transformer. This all results in your leccy being very susceptible to voltage spikes and drops generated by your neighbours as well as within your own house. Similar to water hammer effect when you turn a tap off very quickly.
    All this new fancy electronic stuff generates voltage spikes because it uses very fast “switches” to switch the leccy off and on to simulate leccy frequency many times higher than your 50 Hz mains.And every LED light bulb will operate at a different high frequency. What they manage to cram into a low energy, mains powered, light bulb is amazing, all so the actual LED that generates the light can receive a couple of volts, dc, at a frequency high enough that the average eye does not notice the flicker. But this magic is not perfect so all this very fast switching inside the light bulb sends voltage spikes back towards your fuse box, and then on to every thing connected to it. These spikes will affect the electronics inside the light bulb and thus the light output. Sometimes, if you are lucky, passing your leccy supply to the troublesome light through a ferrite ring, a choke, will take the edge off the spikes and reduce your problem. It is all white man’s magic.

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