Light Dimmer?

P

Papasean

Member
Hello everyone I have a question regarding buying a dimmer or making one. What I'm wanting to do is dim my lighting as needed when it comes to creating soft or bright backgrounds. I have a small fluorescent lighting set and I want to buy or make a dimmer device to use with my set to control the amount of light I want to produce for certain applications.

My light holders are Input :120V~60Hz Lamp base E26/E27 x1 with 100 Watts Max & the current bulbs I'm using are 50 Watts.

I want to keep my budget low so what do you all suggest? Thanks.
 
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I don't believe anyone makes an aftermarket dimmer unit that can work with Fluorescent lights. The Ballast itself has to be designed to be dimmed, and a simple hand dimmer, like the one mentioned here everywhere (Look up Harbor Freight dimmers) will not work with Flo type lights. The entire wiring and ballast would need to be adapted to be able to dim your light units.
I suggest you find some gel to either ND your lights or knock down the lights with nets and flags.
 
I have actualy dimmed flos with a hand built dimmer (very expensive to build) T-12s 40 watt 48 inch with cheap home depot ballasts shouldnt have worked but they did for about 45 min then I think I burned the ballasts out.The harbour freight dimmers are great with tungston I have 5
 
Thanks Flimat11, I'll try harbor freight to see what they have. I have a cheap Britek fluorescent set so hopefully a simple hand dimmer will work with them. Oh yeah what is ND? Sorry for not all knowing the lingo... :)
 
The Harbor Freight one just won't work with fluorescent, period. You run the risk of burning out your ballast if you do.

ND is neutral density, in this case Flimat11 is referring to a gel that you can put in front of the light to knock down its intensity.
 
Huy Vu, thanks man! Yeah I was just looking on Harbor Freight's site so thanks for the info. I use Fluorescent more than Halogen so whatever I find would need to be for Fluorescent. Well if anyone have more options please let me know and thanks again.
 
Go to a GOOD lighting store and ask for household dimmers that will work for fluorescent lights. THey are available, though not cheap. Your probably looking at $35 - $45 a pop but they will work with standard fluorescent lights. Regular cheap dimmers will kill the ballasts.
 
Huh, my background is in electronics but I don't get this thread so please coach me on the theory. I thought dimmers like the one from Harbor Freight use an SCR to change the duty cycle of the RMS voltage, effectively lowering apparent voltage without reducing the peak voltage (lowering the overall voltage could damage the ballast).

On the other hand, using an "expensive" dimmer like a variac which uses a heavy transformer to change the voltage indeed lowers the overall voltage peak and would damage a device during a "brown-out condition", such as a motor, ballast, etc.

Could you guys give some details of what type of electronic circuits are used in a expensive/cheap dimmer?

Thanks, Michael
 
From what I know about flourescents you would need a dimmable ballast. Simple HomeDeopt nor Harbor Frieght units will fork for flourescents.

It is funny that I ran across this thread, because I was just over at Cool Lights website and looking for just this same thing. I wam hoping Richard Andrewski will drop in on this conversation and let us know what he thinks and if he will offer them on his website.

Furthermore to touch on Moonlitnite's question, for a simple dimmer all of the items you would need for a tungsten dimmer are an electrical box, the actual dimmer switch itself, an electrical chord (12/3 is a good chord 10/3 is much better), and finally the electrical recptical ends to connect the lights to the outlets.
 
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