Series 8 and LED support

[olofb]

Hi, I have bought a house with an aging Series 8 P5 Lutron system. It’s in working order but still has a vast number of halogen bulbs and having tried all of the LEDs I can they all either flicker or hum.
I’m really keen to remove my anxiety about switching off the lights and get it upgraded.


Current setup is two panel rooms with H8p5-MI-CE and 29 x hw-rpm-4u-230-ce. The previous owner has put in some synthetic load generators to help some areas support LED but I’m suspicious of these? Are they really synthetic or are they actually just loading / using electricity to bring the transformers up to their minimum 20W load?
What’s the best upgrade path for this setup? There are about 10 horrible aging Crestron touch panels that need to be removed but the lutron button panels are completely functional and there could easily be 50 of them. What are my options for reusing them?


Should I just be looking at Lutron control and dimmers or should I be considering DMX or Luxone? I also need a plant BMS controller upgrade and Luxone seems to be a really obvious choice so there is an attraction to make this the lighting controller as well possibly with a gateway over DMX to access their cheeper transformers. Does anyone do that or is it a massive step back?


What are everyone thoughts on the pro’s and cons. I don’t obviously want to downgrade but I also want to be practical and individual unit savings are material given the scale.

[randyc]

I don't have any experience with the CE products, however, this should be true.

If your RPMs have white labels they were developed a decade before LEDs were. They are never going to work with LEDs. If they have red labels, there is a good chance they will work. They have a 25w minimum load (probably different for CE) which may be a challenge for LEDs.

Red label RPMs are still available from Lutron (in North America). You could consider the 4A module. It supports forward and reverse phase.

Make sure the LEDs you use say incandescent, forward phase, or leading edge dimming.

Yes, the synthetic load device is defeating the purpose of the LEDs. You should still see significant savings.

[olofb]

Hi randyc many thanks for your help, yes they are red labels.

[olofb]

As I understand it even when not dimmed these dimmers still output less than full power to try and preserve halogens.. I’m seeing flickering on LEDs that are more than 20w combined.. is there a way to stop the dimmers outputting less than 100%…

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