I have recessed lights in kitchen. I placed LED lights in them several year ago, spot/flood screw in. I just replaced all five with the updated, lighter weight, technology. When I hit the switch all lights came on. Click it off and two of the lights did not come back on. Checked the socket/light by placing the old but working light back in and the light came on. Concluded it was a bad light…but tow of the? Took back to Lowes and exchange for two new lights. Place the two exchanged new lights in the sockets did not work. Took the non working light swapped it with a working "new" light and it worked. So lights are good, sockets are good as the old lights come on in the sockets. The only thing I can observe is the contact point on the new lights is slightly wider and the actual contact point is slightly recessed more than the old LED's. Any suggestions?
Lighting – Replacing LED lights with LED lights but 2 out of 5 has issues
ledlighting
Related Solutions
If you actually have your fan connected to a light dimmer then you need to replace that with a fan speed controller. The motors of ceiling fans are not made to be run with a standard light dimmer.
The other thing is the windings of a motor are essentially a dead short when the power is first applied. Current spikes which creates a corresponding voltage drop on the line for a split second. As the electromagnetic field of the motor creates impedance the current falls to normal running current and the voltage drop disappears. Sensitive electrical equipment may be affected by these spikes.
That being said, a ceiling fan should not affect LED lighting in this way. The LEDs are not that sensitive and the motor is quite small. If this were normal millions of consumers would be complaining that their lights flicker when their ceiling fan is turned on.
So, again check to see if your fan is connected to a fan rated speed control not a standard light dimmer.
Not all mains powered LED lights are compatible with all types of dimmers. And when you do happen to get a proper LED compatible dimmer with dimmable LED bulbs/drivers it is not uncommon for not all of the lights to work exactly the same.
If you were to swap the positions of two of the LED bulbs/drivers that you have installed you will most likely see the aberrant behavior of the one LED (like your last one of three) move with the bulb/driver and not be related to the position in the circuit. There are a couple of good reasons for this:
- The amount of energy used by each LED bulb/driver is so small that there is not going to be any appreciable voltage drop along the typical 12AWG wiring that is used to hook up a string of three lights. That of course assumes that all the wire interconnections were made with really good quality wire nuts and good workmanship so as to eliminate a high resistance connection.
- The circuitry used in each LED bulb/driver is not going to be a precision designed circuit with carefully tuned behavior with respect to how it reacts to the chopped AC voltage waveform produced by the dimmer unit. Unfortunately the circuits used in LED bulbs/drivers is typically produced in a way that keeps cost to a minimum. This will result in the various bulbs/drivers having different thresholds of chopped AC waveform where they will come on or turn off.
The best advice, if the behavior that you are seeing is too annoying, is to swap in additional LED bulb/drivers until you find a set that all operate to your satisfaction. This need not be an issue having to purchase extra LED bulbs/drivers because in many cases of converting a home from the older incandescent lighting to the energy saving LED lighting you will have some lighting circuits that only have a single light position. You can place units that didn't play well in a group at these locations. And in some cases if the dimming behavior of some units is objectionable you can choose to equip those particular lighting circuits with full on/full off switches instead of dimmers.
I have recently done a 100% conversion of my house over to Lutron smart switches and smart dimmers. I have experienced first hand results of how various LED bulbs and some light fixtures that drivers+LEDs react to being controlled by a dimmer. In several cases I veered away from using a smart dimmer in favor of using a smart on/off switch for the reasons mentioned above. I also experienced some LED bulbs that gave out distinct noise when operated at a dim setting and so replaced those with newer LED bulbs that had a better dimmer compatibility. (This latter has occurred because some lighting positions were changed to LED bulbs a few years ago when regular manual flip toggle switches were in use and the earlier bulbs were just not as dimmer compatible). And finally in some lighting fixtures where there are multiple low wattage bulbs the decision is to stay with incandescent bulbs because of the desire for all the bulbs to exhibit uniform behavior when power to that fixture is controlled by a dimmer. I have not yet addressed two multi-bulb fixtures that use halogen bulbs. These work nicely with the smart dimmers but eventually I will want to look at converting those over to energy saving LEDs. I may be looking at having to do fixture replacement if I end up having problems with multiple parallel halogen->LED replacement bulbs. In that case the most viable solution will likely be a new fixture that uses multiple low voltage LEDs that are sourced from a single driver.
Best Answer
My bet is that the middle contact isn't sprung enough to be consistent.
First, turn the breaker off.
Then, gently tug at the central contact in the middle of the light fixture's socket to bend it a tiny bit further forward. Needlenose pliers can work well for this.
Don't bend it too hard; otherwise you'll have a broken light fixture to deal with.