Electrical – Dimmer – 120V in, 70V out, normal

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I’m redoing a room in my house and I’m replacing a normal switch with a dimmer. I read 120V from hot to ground from the source, and 70V out from the dimmer (Leviton, LED/incandescent compatible). The wiring is pretty straightforward: it’s 2 14/2 wires, whites are connected together with a nut and black from source in the black screw and black that goes to the light on red screw.

Is the 70V after the dimmer normal or it’s faulty? I didn’t connect anything to it yet, I’ve read the reading directly at the end of the wire (about 6 feet).

Best Answer

You will never get 100% out of a dimmer, but 70 sounds low. Do you have a trueRMS multimeter or a cheapo unit? A non-RMS one could be mis-sampling the AC voltage given the irregular shape of the resulting AC waveform, which can give an off reading.

I would also check again with a load (bulb) in-place. You might not have enough current to get the triac (the component that "dims" AC) to latch (holding current, often >10ma, aka 1.2 watts in USA) early enough in the sine wave. Adding a load will enable everything to work as designed, which could (should?) fix the issue.