Here in Part 3 of My LED Series, I'll Explore The Whole LED Dimmer Mess

There's a three-fixture chandelier hanging in the dining area of my apartment - well, more like the kitchen-side of my long living room, but it's a cozy Manhattan abode in which many rooms serve such double duty.

Anyway, the chandelier with three fixtures is connected to a dimmer. I tried to do the responsible thing and I bought CFLs for it. Except, they didn't dim. It took me three tries before I found dimmables that worked.

Unfortunately, the same dimmer mix-and-match dilemma is just as pronounced in the LED bulb world. Here in Part 3 of my LED series, I'll explore the whole LED dimmer mess, as well as briefly mentioning 3-way LED bulbs (or lack thereof) and whether the federal government is trying to force you to buy LED bulbs by outlawing incandescent bulbs.

Dimming LED?

There are dimmable LED bulbs. But they may or may not work in your dimmable fixture.

Why? Even the experts are hard-pressed to explain the problem in anything but engineering jargon.

The simplest, least jargon-filled explanation is two-fold.

First, incandescent light bulbs are easily dimmed - a dimmer simply provides you a way of lessening the power to the bulb. Less wattage, less light. Simple.

But, as we discussed, LED light bulbs are not really light bulbs at all, but a bunch of circuits. Lowering the wattage simply turns off the circuits - you know, digital, either on or off?

So, in order to be dimmable, LED bulbs have to have circuitry built in so when you slide the dimmer switch to provide less power, the LED bulb recognizes this not as an on/off situation, but as a cue to dim the circuit-controlled light.

And here's where the whole LED dimming theory falls apart. Apparently, there is more than one way to build a dimmer switch - around a half dozen ways such as magnetic or electronic, rotary or slide, and several other variations - 0-10V, DALI, 2-Wire, Modified Dali, DMX are supposedly common industry terms, for example.

Lutron, the leader is lighting systems, tries to explain the different types of dimmers here. If you're a contractor or lighting engineer, the Lighting Control Association devotes a section of its Web site to LED dimming.

In other words, an LED bulb has to know which protocol the dimmer it's plugged into uses. And because there are so many dimmer protocols, no dimmable LED can know them all.

Why do many dimmer standards? "Because they were started at different times by different companies to solve different problems with different light sources," helpfully explains Naomi J. Miller, �senior lighting engineer �technology planning and deployment at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

LED dimmer advice

I'm told MOST dimmable LED bulbs will work in MOST dimmer switches, or words to that effect.

Skip this next technical explanation from Michael Poplawski, senior lighting engineer for the U.S. Department of Energy's SSL (Solid State Lighting) Program unless you're a contractor or an engineer:

"[Dimmer] products developed and deployed...to-date almost all use phase-cut technology, of which there are two broad classes (forward and reverse-phase), neither of which has a standard implementation, and specific phase-cut control products are further designed for different types of lighting loads (e.g. incandescent, low-voltage source on a magnetic transformer, low-voltage source on a electronic transformer, LED or CFL sources). For LED or CFL sources, it is important to note that a specific make/model control does NOT work equally well on all LED or CFL sources."

In other words, no one can advise any non-engineer on how to tell which kind of dimmer switch they have, and which dimmable LED bulbs will work with which unidentifiable dimmer switch.

"Even many lamp manufacturers don't know which will work," reveals Burt Grant, owner of Metro Area Sales, a Long Island-based commercial lighting company, and my cousin (doesn't everyone have a cousin in the lighting business?). "There are so many types out there that it is difficult to keep track of the type and manufacturers both old and new."

Best advice: check the Web site of the dimmable LED bulb maker for compatible dimmer fixtures. Although, says Poplawski, "the only reliable practice is to try it out for yourself."

Everyone in the lighting business knows this LED dimming conundrum is not a sustainable situation and industry groups are working on some sort of dimming standardization. But a solution is likely a way off, and ubiquitous standardization (since there are a lot of installed dimmers to deal with) probably even farther off.

Three-way LED?

The three-way bulb question is easier to answer - there aren't any, at least from the major LED bulb makers (Philips, GE, et al).

Like dimmables, creating a three-way LED bulb is not a matter of adjusting power to the bulb to change the brightness but sophisticated (and expensive) circuitry to control the lumens output.

But now that we'll soon have a 100-watt bulb, I'm told a three-way LED also may make its initial appearance in 2013.

Legislative

You may remember a news cycle about eight months ago with headlines screaming about the death of 100-watt incandescent bulbs because of an act of Congress in name of energy conservation. This news was followed by push-back from the anti-nanny state faction that insisted we should have a right to buy any bulb we want.

You still do. The legislation is question, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (aka EISA, H.R. 6), is a sweeping 310 page bill covering 14 distinct industries, energy use environments and energy types including automobiles, buildings, biofuels, solar power, the smart grid, even pool and spa safety, and designed:

To move the United States toward greater energy independence and security, to increase the production of clean renewable fuels, to protect consumers, to increase the efficiency of products, buildings, and vehicles, to promote research on and deploy greenhouse gas capture and storage options, and to improve the energy performance of the Federal Government, and for other purposes.

Title III—Energy Savings Through Improved Standards For Appliance And Lighting, Subtitle B—Lighting Energy Efficiency, merely dictates that light bulbs had to meet certain common sense (given our energy production issues and the fact that incandescents use four times as much power as LEDs) energy levels.

Over the next three years, A19 incandescent bulbs have to be 25 percent more efficient by 2014 and around 200 percent more efficient by 2020 or will be outlawed. Not all incandescents immediately, just those that bulbs that are the equivalent of gas guzzlers. (See page 88 of EISA for the wattage maximums.)

In order to meet this efficiency standard, incandescent bulb makers will have to add halogen to meet these standards, according to LEDucation, which may push incandescent bulb prices up.

Except, in order to maintain our freedom to buy incandescent gas guzzlers, the anti-nanny state forces made sure there was no money to enforce the law.

This quasi-law has left the lighting industry in an unanticipated and potentially anti-business quandary.

Responsible bulb makers want to obey the law, regardless of the lack of enforcement. Like good corporate citizens, they don't want to break the law just because they can. They make light bulbs - we can see them.

But less scrupulous incandescent bulbs makers have no such qualms, which means your choice of incandescents come down to higher-priced more power-efficient brand-name bulbs and cheap law-breaking bulbs from companies you never heard of.

So do mainstream incandescent bulb makers break the law to remain competitive?

But that's not what you're worried about. The point is you can still buy 100-watt incandescent bulbs and you don't have to switch to LED.

But in Part 4 of this LED series, I'll give you the intertwined economic and ecological reasons why you should switch.