Loose Bulb Connectionįlickering can also be caused from a loose connection somewhere along the closed circuit the LED is involved in. However if you notice that the lights start to flicker temporarily at random times throughout the day this might be the cause for it. This should however not become a super consistent issue as the voltage in homes tends to stabilize not long after the initial flickering. When the voltage starts to fluctuate it will also cause the lights in the home to have a fluctuating light output.
Led light flicker driver#
Every form of LED makes use of some sort of driver in order to function since they don’t work when directly connected to the power of an outlet. Faulty LED DriverĪnother reason for an LED to possibly flicker is a faulty LED driver. This is also why the more it is dimmed down the slower it will flicker, because the more you dim it down the longer the off state becomes. These extended intervals is what causes the LED to start flickering. What instead happens for the LED is that it will start to fluctuate between a complete on and a complete off, like it also would normally but this time with much longer intervals. When you apply the same dimming principle to an LED it won’t keep any residual heat since it doesn’t build upon any heat generation principles to create light. This means that even in the time where the light isn’t actually powered there is still residual heat (and therefore light) still present within the filament. This works well for most older constructions of light such as an incandescent bulb or a halogen bulb, because they are built on a heat generation principle through a thermally heated filament. This effect gets even more amplified when we start dimming the lights since real time between the on and off state gets increased significantly. This also means that the lights are actually constantly blinking instead of being in a complete steady state of being turned on. What this means aswell is that any given light source will alternate between being turned off and on 100-120 times per second since it will turn on at both the top and bottom apex of the wave. These sine waves occur 50-60 times per second, depending on where you live and the frequency of your home’s voltage. Understanding this dimming principle is important in order to understand why it can cause LEDs to flicker. However it is mostly the trailing edge dimming principle that gets used the most since it creates a soft increase of the wave instead of a sudden spike that then drops off. There is also a leading edge dim in which it’s the first half instead of the second half of the wave that gets cut off. This is an example of a trailing edge dim, meaning that the trailing edge of the sine wave has gotten cut off in order to create a dimming effect.