Lights fade-in/fade-out effect

Hardware Home Automation
1

Hi all,

i’m designing my new flat and i want to have dimmable lights with fade-in/fade-out efect in every room. By that I mean that the lights will slowly (about 2 seconds) turn from 0% to X% when turned on and vice versa when turned off. The X% value will depend on current settings. I believe that it can be achived in multiple ways, I choosed to buy a zWave dimmer (qubino flush dimmer) and it works perfectly with LED strips powered witch 24VDC power supply. The dimmer also work with dimmable 230V LED bulbs, but there is a problem. Generally the 230V dimmable LED bulbs have poor dimming capabilities, e.g. they does not have full 0%-100% dimming range. At least i couldn’t find one that is satisfying for me. Making all my lights as LED strips is no go, I want some spot lights or lamps. I also couldn’t find any 24VDC led bulbs that would work with my dimmer. Does anyone here has some expirience with dimmable led bulbs and can recommend specific brand / model ? Or maybe there is another/better method to achieve my goals ?

PS.
I choosed qubino flush dimmer also because it has power mesurement capabilites, so i can also monitor power usage - this is also one of my goals, so if dimming solution will not use qubino dimmer i will need to buy another device to measure the power usage, the budget is also limited :slight_smile:

2

Hello Marek

You have maybe the problem, that the LED bulbs have to less power consumation to work correctly with its dimmer.

May you test a dimmer bypass like this:
http://www.zwave-shopping.com/de/dimmer-mit-montage/fibaro/4460-fibaro-dimmer-bypass-2-fibfgb-002-5902020528555.html

Regards
Michael

3

In my experience qubino does a better job at dimming leds, and you don’t need a bypass for qubino.

For fibaro you can change the dimming timing see parameter 5-8

For Qubino you can set parameter 60.

Both fibaro and qubino have power monitoring.

Regards, S

4

Thanks fo response, but my question was more about bulbs, i’m quite happy with qubino dimmer, and as @Seaside stated they are doing well with dimming leds. So could someone say that he/she has a dimmable 230V AC or 24V DC dimmable led bulb that actually has 0%-100% dimming range (or at least 5%-100% range) and is able to make nice fade-in/fade-out effect ?

side note:
I made a PWM dimmable led driver using pt4115 chip. And I plan to use that with some led lamp that is supplied with external led driver.

5

If you already have it in place, try parameter 65:

Parameter no. 65 – Dimming time (soft on/off)
Set value means time of moving the Dimmer between min. and max. dimming values by short press of push button or controlled through UI (BasicSet). Available configuration parameters (data type is 2 Byte DEC):

Default value 100 = 1 s
50 - 255 = 500 mseconds – 2550 mseconds (2,55 s), step is 10 mseconds

As far as to specific LED bulbs, I’ve tried 4 different, but they are too white for me to want to use them, so now I’m using halogen again.

Regards S

6

I just tested philips warm glow 230V led bulbs and they work quite well, the dimming range is actually 0%-100%, and nice fade-in/fade-out effect can be achieved. Only the dimming curve is not completely linear (but I believe this is due to switching between warm-white and cold-white leds) but acceptable.