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Thread: Need suggestions on best method to control dimmable under vanity lights.

  1. #1
    Junior Member
    Join Date
    Apr 2023
    Posts
    4

    Need suggestions on best method to control dimmable under vanity lights.

    Not sure if this is the best place to post this, so ADMIN feel free to move in necessary.

    There are a few posts about this from several years ago but I wanted to see if there are any improved solutions. I do like the post from 2020 that recommends ClickBright as that seems like a cool product.

    New RadioRA3 system. In the past I have done under counter lights with 120v rope light and a Floor Lamp Dimmer module. Easy and clean, except the separation of the LEDs is quite obvious. Newer solutions with LED Strips, channels and diffusers seem like a better quality of light.

    I wish Lutron made a TRIAC dimmer controller that I could control with RadioRA3. Wouldn't that be cool! By adding a third party TRIAC dimmer controller I am concerned that 1) adding more parts so more places to go wrong and 2) compatibility (flicker) and 3) space for all the parts under my vanity. This also seems like we are adding a lot of parts and cost (compared to the old fashion rope light).

    Anyone have any success stories or product recommendations?

  2. #2
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Dec 2013
    Posts
    579
    I'm an electrician focused more on lighting rich people homes so I have more expensive taste. If it was my own home, I'd just go to costco and buy a remote RGB kit and if it didn't work out, toss it out in a few years. I'm not a fancy person. For my professional installations however, I stick with tried and true brands that I know dim well with Lutron and I can find replacement parts for 5-10 years down the line when one section of the lighting goes out and not having it match isn't an option.

    For LED strips:
    So for years, we stuck with WAC Lighting which is pretty expensive- I think it comes out to be around $20 a foot. You can buy 1 foot sections or 5' sections. You have the choice of various color temperatures and brightness. It has a remote driver and you have to use their own lead cable. The driver's output is 24AC which makes it nice because you don't have to worry about keeping track of positive and negative wires, but you absolutely need to have an ELV dimmer for it. I found that with the 96W driver there is sometimes ghosting when it's off but the LUT-MLC takes care of that. We have never had any of them go bad. I think the oldest ones we installed are 7 years ago (Obama was still president) and it's still going.

    In the last 2 years however, our supplier started carrying LEDI Lighting products https://ledi.lighting/ which have more options and have LEDs closer together so it looks more uniform. My favorite part is that they don't require an ELV dimmer and if you have 35 watts or so minimum load (don't quote me on the number), you can just use a forward phase triac dimmer. For us it's great because we can do each side of a book case in a room that has a fire place in the middle, and just use a plug-in dimmer in the bottom and link them via a pico.

    Undercabinet Lighting:

    My first choice for a kitchen or study undercabinet lights however is the classic undercabinet fixtures. They are a lot more durable and diffuse light better. You can also change the color temperatures on them, rotate the head to aim the light, etc. I only use strips inside of cabinets and prefer these when it's exposed. For that I only use Maxim Lighting or Kichler. Again, not cheap. If it was my own house, I'd go to Home Depot and get Ecosmart or some other BS brand because I'm not fancy and I don't care if the color temperature or CRI is a little off. If you live in a house that has Lutron though, you deserve the best!

  3. #3
    Junior Member
    Join Date
    Nov 2023
    Posts
    1
    I've used 95 CRI light strips from Waveform along with Lutron driver ( L3D0-96W24V-U) and matching 3-wire dimmer, gets down to 0.1% dimming which I have to say is pretty amazing (Lutron does a demo of this in their headquarters if you take a class there, difference between 10%, 1% and 0.1% is surprisingly noticeable). Ultra smooth response if you do like a 60s slow raise, zero discernable flicker through the ramp.

    Pretty annoying the driver doesn't have the dimming built in for us RadioRA3 people, but ah well.

    My wife bought a cabinet that had some cheap LED strip lighting with 3rd party dimmers and the quality is awful, flickering, non-smooth dimming adjustment. I'm going to rip it all out and replace with a full Lutron setup.

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