Bulbs for touch bedside lamps

Probably if you pick bulbs that are 'smart dimmable' - these work with all forms of dimmer...

The way of the future 10 years ago was to put the smartness into the device. I am afraid you will need "an app" though.

While it's only worth what you pay for it (in my case £0) and is very much a toy, Google Home (I know some people like Alexa, but nearly everybody has a Google account somewhere) is your friend for stitching the myriad smart devices you will acquire into a coherent home.

Just make sure you do not under any circumstances rely on it for anything non-trivial.

Probably not. Most dimmers work by only switching on for part of the mains AC cycle, some the first part, others the the second. Old dimmers tend to cut out the first part, newer ones the second.

Your bedside light probably has the first type, a leading edge dimmer. LEDS do not like this type of dimmer, which is why we are changing to the second type, known as a trailing edge dimmer.

There is an additional issue, in that most dimmers have a minimum load, and its probably not reached by an LED bulb.

Lastly my experience was that LEDs didn't dim smoothly regardless of the dimmer.

Do "smart dimmable" really work with all sorts of dimmer. Don't these have their own switched mode PSU that tries to compensate?

I do use these now as they dim smoothly, but controlled by a home assistant of some type, Google Nest, Amazon Alexa, Siri.. etc.

Yes we have Alexa for for some reason...

Most things have manual over-ride.

Dave

Yup. My homebuilt 'smart hub' has been recoded about 4 times with 'updates' so far . Its pretty reliable.

I don't want anything that relies on the internet to work either

They seem to *so far*.

I've got 20 year old leading edge all over the place and its been flickery and uneven all its life. But the new bulbs I purchased last month seem stable.

I think there is probably a new chip out there that 'JustWorks™', and everyone is now using it...

I mean its not beyond the bounds to put a little µP in there and measure the input signal, do a little lookup and apply the answer to a SMPS as control...

For reference I bought two bulbs for the kitchen/diner. One was a '60watt eq. candle with standard bayonet and the other was a mains spotlight bulb - GU something - 50W equivalent, but sold as 'smart dimmable.

Best dimmers *ever*.

The c. £10 for 2 Tapo bulbs I put in our bedside lamps dim flickerlessly

All the lounge bulbs (x4) are also smart dimmable.

All may seem like so much frippery, but SWMBO is wheelchair bound, so less able to fiddle with apps and switches. Voice control is rather key.

That could be an increasingly tough ask.

Being honest I regret plumping with Google Mini as the voice control. They can't be modified to work locally.

That said, if I were to go for a local voice control setup, it would lead to HomeAssistant. And whilst I have that setup and working, I also have this strong instinct not to trust it. I've found too many things that can go wrong with it.

When I have been immobilised dues to medical issues, the last thing I care about is 'can I dim the lights'

And voice control as in 'Nurse, can you dim the lights?' often worked

I have a Hubitat, which does local control of zigbee devices (it can do z-wave and wifi too but I don't have any)

Google "tricked" me into using their voice control by sending me a free Nest Mini, it works fairly well most of the time, but has the occasional hiccup. I would prefer non-cloud voice recognition, but haven't gone down the Home Assistant rabbit hole, it was a clever move from Google as I've bought more Nest devices since ...

One of the main benefits of divorce is that I don't have constant female voices telling me what to do.

And given that I have constant access to a computer when home a local web based controller works fine for me.

The only internet access required is to keep the time right, but that's not essential

I have a couple of Ikea smart lamps (without their hub) one of them feels like it's about to die (occasional flashes to full brightness when it's at low level) just looked at their website and hell must be about to freeze over ... they have BC22 versions!

The answers have come a long way from my original question, which was 'do I need dimmable bulbs for a 3 stage touch bedside lamp'. It seems the answer is 'yes', but I'm not sure if I need anything 'smart'. I looked at the online options and many seem totally unsuitable for reading in bed, sometimes because they have dark shades and/or the recommended bulb might not be bright enough. It then dawned on my tired brain, that I really don't need a three stage lamp after all. All I need is an off-on touch function to save scrabbling round looking for the off switch, in which case any old LED bulb would do.

Yes. mast of my dimmers are pointless.

I sort of stumbled into IoT personally. (Did a lot in work in the early noughties). Mainly a smart thermostat so SWMBO could control the heating easily, as the thermostat is out of reach. That sort of started me off hubless.

They work just enough to be useful. However I wouoldn't trust them too far.

Homeassistant looks like it's an industrial strength offering. Especially with it's pretentions to the HomeAssistant OS" intended to commandeer a rPi. However, as with all community based efforts, you will find that it is never wrong, and can have no flaws. And if it does it's your problem.

If you want to do anything remotely useful, you will find yourself having to edit the constellation of config files it squirrels away everywhere. Because the UI may look fab. But there are a fucktonne of things you can't do in it that you would expect to.

The main reason we got dimmable bulbs was because they were smart. The actual dimming feature is rarely used.

A common problem which comes in to Repair Cafes, either the touch dimmer won't work with LEDs, or the filament bulb flashed over when it died and did for the touch dimmer.

There are now some touch dimmer modules available for LEDs, but in my experience, the dimming part barely works with any of a selection of different LEDs, although the on/off part does work with LEDs. A common failing with many of the touch module replacements is not using an adequately rated class Y safety capacitor to connect to the metalwork. I have been known to transfer the class Y capacitor from the old module into the new module, when the old module has a correctly rated one.

Yes. Seen that here a few times.

But modern LEDS are *much* better at dimming.

There is a new generation out there, that seem to know that its an incandecent dimmer and work anyway.

That is what I used to find, but not any more with bulbs rated as 'smart' dimmable.

I would have thought that it would be easier to have a DC LED light source (e.g. 12V) and have a SMPS and PWM dimmer. It isn't as if the bulb will need to be replaced, as the LEDs would last as long as the luminaire.

Essentially that seems to be what the new 'smart LEDS' are: some kind of SMPS and a chip that detects the dimmer waveform and varies the SMPS voltage.