Low class inline dimmer from eBay. (with schematic)
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- Опубликовано: 18 ноя 2019
- An exploration of a very standard inline dimmer that is clearly not intended for consumer installation. It can also apparently be killed by using the wrong "type" of lamp.
There's no point trying to fix this device, so it'll either be getting modified or recycled.
If you enjoy these videos you can help support the channel with a dollar for coffee, cookies and random gadgets for disassembly at:-
www.bigclive.com/coffee.htm
This also keeps the channel independent of RUclips's advertising algorithms allowing it to be a bit more dangerous and naughty. 
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You may _hear_ the soldering iron? All those years as an electrician, Clive can now hear electrons flowing and he thinks everyone else can too.
I have a dimmer like this on my salt lamp. When the bulb burnt out I couldn't find a replacement so I just got a new socket and replaced it, but I took apart the dimmer to see how it worked. At the time I had no idea what I was looking at, but after a few years of watching your videos I definitely understand now.
Just thought I'd share that and thank you for making these. I've learned SO much from all your videos, and been quite entertained along the way! :D
They had a huge recall on those salt lamp dimmers a couple years back. Apparently there was an issue with them overheating, burning out and/or starting fires.
It's as clear to me as calculus !
The bulbs to put in those salt lamps are called "Pygmy" lamps. These lamps can still be found for use in ovens and refrigirators because an LED in an oven would melt. So these pygmy incandescent lamps are going to be available for years to come, just gotta know what to look for.
I was just about to say this, also, I somehow destroyed my salt lamp cable dimmer thing, now I'm thinking, mabye I blew the dimmer
Home Bargains sells the E14 appliance lamps at £0.89 for a pack of two.
They're the 15w 240v ones with the lightly smoked/amber glass.
As an Amateur Radio operator thanks for mentioning the electrical noise from these terrible triac switched devices. We all need to avoid generating additional RFI.
The gap in the pad is so the solder doesn't bridge over the hole during wave soldering.
That's what I was thinking too.
No your wrong it's to save cost as not using as much material making the circuit board, as tesco says every little helps.
@@Dime_Bar If they were that worried about the cost of that tiny bit of solder, they would have taken off those unused fuse pads.
Mystery solved. Genius
Nice. Thanks for the info
I think the channel motto could be, "That didn't last very long".
jeah, thats for sure funnier than "don't turn it on, take it apart"
yha, and it works for so many things. Projects that get done faster then expected. Gadgets that break faster then expected. FOOD. Drink!
@@ICountFrom0 sex ... ^^
"Clive fiddles with knob, not clickbait"
Most lamp cords sold in the US and Canada are configured as two separate conductors, each with their own insulation jacket, stuck together in parallel rather than being enclosed in an outer insulator. I guess they’re actually molded in one piece with two channels side by side. However they’re made, they’re very easy to split into two separate conductors without any danger of cutting a conductor or accidentally removing the insulation. That may be the type of cord that the dimmer manufacturer had in mind - it’s marginally more consumer-friendly.
in the eu, typicallly speaker wire for sound systems is molded with the insulation like that.....
used to be normal for lamps and electric clocks etc. in the UK but it isn't allowed any more.
I'm so stoked you did this dimmer. I reverse engineered one of these using one of your old videos as a guide, and so getting to see you work through it like this gives me confidence that I actually understand your older video.
I can never look at "the nice solder" again without thinking "Juicy Lead-Based Solder". Kester should create a line called "Big Clive's Juicy Lead-Based Solder".
I think Clive really is big enough for endorsement style sponsorship deals... I've always thought "Big Clive Approved" should be a thing for Poundland electronic items. Even if you had no idea who he was, you'd see the stickers on the boxes and think "oh, this must be better than the one without the sticker".
Yup, it'd be the stuff with lead in it, that's useful for soldering.
I get the feeling that these cuts in pads shown in 5:17 might be made that way so the hole won't close when everything is soldered by wave soldering.
After some searching it looks that making that cut in pad helps preventing filling that hole with solder.
But that's kind of counterproductive for a solder terminal like that.
@Dave Micolichek If assembled like Clive did, there's no hole to keep empty, just a nice fresh blob to put the wire in without adding fresh solder.
@@johncrowerdoe5527 But the way Clive done that, is not proper unfortunatelly. It would be acceptable only with double sided, plated hole FR4 PCBs, or if the hole of the pad is riveted through with a brass tubular rivet. These phenolic boards doesn't hold their copper clad very well, it's easy to rip the pad off if used this way.
@@mrnmrn1 You obviously haven't worked with SMD-only designs.
@@johncrowerdoe5527 I worked on SMD-only designs. It's quite different. I solely use FR-4, which holds the copper clad much stronger than this phenolic garbage. Mechanical holding pads on SMD connectors are pretty large, and it's good practice to strew the area with vias for extra strenght. A single through-hole pad on a phenolic board is something that I wouldn't trust holding thick mains wires. Even in chepo noname boomboxes in the '90s, the Chinese riveted the pads which they wanted to surface mount wires onto.
No, don’t toss it in the bin yet; you still have to do a proper EOL video where you short the bulb, turn the dimmer up to full, and then plug it in so there’s a loud >bang< and smoke and fire inside the dimmer! Then you can toss it in the bin. 😆 P.S. A long extension cord is not required, but is suggested. Also, make sure the camera is recording and is pointed at the soon-to-die dimmer innards, so that you can post the video to RUclips!
Brilliant. I had one of these delivered but had absolutely no clue how to plumb it in. Now I not only know how wire it in, but the entire physics of everything inside.
Always love watching Clive strip on camera.
Ah, yes. Also those nimble fingers when he's holding his tools.
He has strip lights just for that purpose.
Oh wait till you see the legs. YES THE LEGS!
(visions of a hairy bag of porridge)
woof
I bet Clive has to swim through a sea of ebay tat to reach his bed.
There's a path....
@@bigclivedotcom Oh like some kind of tunnel you've dug out?
@Matt Quinn Illuminated mainly by custom built lamps.
doily in the morning
@FJS It's embarrassingly full of mounds of technical stuff.
I enjoyed his very smooth drawing of a diac and triac in one continuous motion without lifting the pen.
@CanizaM
that is someone who has drawn many diacs and triacs , it is impressive tho :-)
Hey Clive, THANK YOU! This video saved my life. I ordered the exact same dimmer, except mine was rated for 110V. You took me from total confusion to easy peasey!!
Those macro prints are truly amazing.
Actually, the 20K resistor limits the brightest setting, not the dimmest setting. When the variable resistor is set to minimum, the 20K resistor still limits how quickly the capacitor can charge up to 32V so the start of the waveform is always chopped off a bit. The dimmest setting is at full resistance, where you have 520K total which makes the capacitor charge up much more slowly, thus delaying the firing of the diac and triac.I'm not really sure why this is needed except perhaps to limit the triac gate current in the (very) short time between the gate conducting current and the main triac conducting current.
Have just fitted one of these to a set of vintage Pifco Fairy Lights , glad i found your video because there is NO wiring diagram or any sort of instructions with it . It seems to be working very well so far - i dim the lights to about 80% brightness to save stress on the vintage screw-in bulbs and its stopped the bulbs over-heating . The lights are rated 22 watts .
I brought one, no instructions anywhere on internet it seemed.. so glad one of my favourite youtuber's was on it.
Many years ago I bought a dimmer of the sort that's typically installed in place of a wall switch, often used for dining area lights to give a little "atmosphere". This got installed in a standard electrical box along with some outlets, and worked well for me for many years. The initial application was dimming those incandescent lights that were all over the tree that never got watered enough and invariably dried out way too quickly, but later on it dimmed my bedroom night table lamps. Oh, and that thing did raise merry hell any time I tried to use a standard AM radio anywhere in the house, no filtering at all.
Fast forward a number of years and I offered to build one for my lady, so we went to the store and bought what I thought were pretty much the same parts, only it's behaving a bit oddly. If you turn it all the way down, then when you turn it up nothing happens until you get to a certain point and then the lamp comes on rather brightly, at which point I can turn it down to where I want it. Not the best for having to get up in the middle of the night... I have yet to disassemble the thing and see what sort of extra stuff they've put in there.
Some time back I was given a couple of LED bulbs for those bedroom lamps, said "dimmable" on the package. I tried them out, and the problem was that they would "sing", rather loudly. This was never going to do for a bedroom situation where I wanted quiet, so the original incandescent bulbs went back in, and those LED bulbs went back in their boxes, to be used elsewhere eventually...
@13:37 ... nano farts? I really don't understand circuitry, but I still enjoy watching all Clive's videos. I might learn something. 🤓
What cost more this time around... The ink or the item?
The purpose of the capacitor is to integrate the voltage during each half cycle. If instead of a capacitor there was a resistor (which would constitute along with the potentiomenter a voltage divider), the diac would always trigger when the latest, at the cusp of each half cycle and the dimmer would only be adjustable in a 50%-100% range
Thanks Clive. I'm a HAM radio operator and dimmers are a nuisance on "Short Wave" 0-30 Megahertz.
Thanks for the frequencies. That seems to cover all 3 broadcast AM bands that don't require a HAM license to receive.
I'm just going to assume he meant all the frequencies AM or otherwise that are in that ranger. Harmonics at 50 or 60 Hz intervals all the way from the bottom to the top. Also, the old CRT TV's radiated broadly with harmonics about 15 KHz intervals.
Yes, Hams still use those bands, and we have some new ones which are susceptible as well.
Hams are indeed live and well.
Also, loads of other radios systems really dont like that noise pollution including digital radio
Re: rfi from triacs. As a radio amateur Clive - I think triac dimmers are the least noisy of the present crop of noise sources available to consumers - anything switched-mode is usually MUCH worse - these put out 'birdies' that wobble and drift all over the bands at multiple frequencies, sometimes even wideband crud up as far as 15MHz. :o(
noakeswalker cheap switched mode laptop chargers are a bugger for this, have to disconnect my laptop charger if I want to be able to hear anything on 40m
Love how the Patreon email title was "Really crappy inline dimmer" and the RUclips title is "Low class inline dinner...". I wouldn't put it past RUclips to demonetize the word "crappy".
Yeah. I can be honest with the title on Patreon. RUclips is getting a bit sensitive to even tame words like shitty.
@@bigclivedotcom or the proper spelling "shitey" 😂
Raymond Mucklow is this a joke I’ve missed? Shitty is the correct vernacular.
Edit to say ‘yup, probably a joke I’ve missed over the years since I’m not a patron’.
Well since it's not a "dinner", but a "dimmer", that's comprehensible.
@@bigclivedotcom Honestly here in the USA I think "shit" is probably widely considered the naughtiest profanity that doesn't (normally) have a sexual connotation. It's interesting how different cultures view things like that.
The board should be rotated 90 degrees.
That's what I was thinking, and given there are holes at the solder point I think the wire should go under the board and not pass over the solder side.
That's exactly what I did with mine. Only my two halves had no screws and didn't even snap shut. I managed a good safe job though. You get what you pay for.
The slot in the solder pad is used to prevent the hole in the solder pad to be covered by solder during wave soldering.
After wave soldering, a cable/wire is supposed to be fed through the hole and soldered to the pad.
Standard practice :-).
I lived in the world of one-sided-PCBs in the late 1980'ies in a Danish company that developed and manufactured parts like circuit breakers, dimmers, remote controlled relays and similar for 230VAC installations: LK a/s.
The dimmer you draw a schematic of, was the standard configuration in the 1980'ies.
A Triac, a Diac, an ajustable resistor (plus one), a capacitor, two connectors (and a required fuse), - that was it.
The shelf price in the stores in 1985 was £15, - the result of missing competition.
--
Added info:
In 1964, LK a/s had ~4200 employees.
In 1995, LK a/s had ~1000 employees.
Today LK a/s have ~100 employees and is a part of Schneider Electric, France.
luv /JD
I just had an idea, I've come into some lava lamps lately, the previous owner replaced the bulbs with different wattage lamps nothing to hight but just high enough that one works to well and the other works. A guy could get a dimmer and control the flow of the lava lamp. All of this happened while falling asleep. In and out of sleep. I used to watch your videos at the end of the day to relax. But my situation has changed, I tend to watch them in the morning. But today being my birthday I didn't watch any videos til now. 10pm. Almost dropped my phone in my lap dozing off. Anyway very cool video. I whish they made more stuff in clear plastics. Cheers from freezing rain kansas.
You used to be able to get lava lamps with a built in dimmer.
Happy birthday, Raymond! From sunny and warm (for the time being) Texas.
I think the break in the pad is to stop surface tension from closing the hole if they're using wave soldering.
Dimmer and Dimmer. I like how you draw out the waveforms. Cliveoscope!
I can see why these don't play nice with some LED lights. Since only the live is being used the load is the implicit connection to neutral to provide a voltage reference for charging the RC circuit that fires the triac. Normally a standard incandescent filament acts like a shorted link when its cold, but an LED with a power supply in it will probably do weird things if its not for use with one.
thank you a lot for this work, it really helps for a begginer in electronics!! thank you again!
It seems you can actually solder the wires on opposite corners if you use the pin of the switch instead of the hole. That should make for a bit better wire placement inside
I'm fairly sure this is a clear version of the black-cased salt lamp dimmers they recalled a few years ago in Canada for their amazing self-destruct and fire starting capabilities.
Simple circuit so easy to follow explanation. Thank you your all your clips. Greetings from Germany :-)
I have always had a slight problem in dealing with people. I always seem to think that everyone I speak with knows what I know. Well especially if they are in the same field as I am. Point in fact, back in 1974 I was stationed at Fort Bliss Texas, I was in charge of the Radio Teletype Section, as well as voice communications. So we decided to build ourselves a mobile communications van on the back of an old Duce and a half truck that had a shop shell on it. So we built on it and were nearly finished.. One day I was busy with meetings at the main commo shop, the truck was in the motor pool, which is where trucks should be when not in use. So I sent two of my fellow communicators down to the motor pool with some switches and an exhaust fan which was to be mounted in a port in the rear of the van. They came back and reported that the fan must be burned out since they had put in 3 switches and all three burned out when they turned them on. Well being the good supervisor I was, I finished my meetings and went with them back to the motor pool. I had them put in another switch for me so I could see what was happening. they did as you suggested, wired one side of 24 Volts DC to one side of the switch, and grounded the other side, before they could turn it on and burn out another switch I stopped them and gave them an impromptu lesson on how to wire in a switch. These guys were trained to operate radios and switchboards, install telephones and even wire in AC lighting in the field, but they could not fathom how to install a switch.
I got one of these (in black) on a cheap salt lamp. Used it, mostly because I didn’t know any better, until the Triac went bang unexpectedly in the night. Replaced the whole thing with a proper UL-rated lamp set. Still have the circuit board somewhere in the shop
You'll probably find the neutral is supposed to be routed on the component side of the board
Due to possible shock prevention through a faulty pot?
@@tomaszwota1465 He ment on the other side of the pcb, because there is a lot of space for that conductor to go through.
@@teslakovalaborator ah, that, haha. Yeah, now it makes sense.
Indeed, this is how it's routed on the pair of table lamps I bought that came with the same clear housing but a slightly different PCB.
I bought the exact same deal except as a lamp wiring harness for US (120vac A12 base) the dimmer is identical except with black plastic. It lasted just about as long as yours, except the Triac has a crack down the face and emitted "that smell" (Ie bakekite on overbake). It was to be a nitelight for my mother, just as well, it could have started a fire. I ordered a quality one with slide pot for about $14 us, and it works great. Smallest triac I've seen pressed into line service. A 15-20a one in a TO-220 is only a cents more. I'm surprised they didn't use a neon for the diac. Maybe the price of NE-2a has gone up. Great example of overcheapening.
PS - It wasn't your LED lamp that killed it - mine died in 1/2hr of 60w incadescent. Without proper filtering, I'd bet the shutoff spikes are killing the Triac with overvoltage.
As a ham radio operator, I was pleased to see that item go in the bin where it belongs.
Nice timing on the new bigclivedotcom video notification, I'm just at the end of turning 4 USB powerbanks from Poundland into 2 RC car battery packs - higher capacity and less than half the price of pre-made packs :)
Thanks to Clive for his teardown video of them a year ago, they're the 2200mAh 18650 £2 version.
7:05 that's to the customer's benefit. No need to fully unscrew each and every one if you mount hundreds of them. It's the same with screw terminals; you should NEVER supply them in a product with every terminal screwed down.
ABSOLUTELY LOVE the PINK POT
Some great old school wire stripping and one handed soldering!
Automatic subtitle jibberish:
👍 4:23 lead-based solder
🤔 4:28 led-based soda
Thanks for showing me something else I knew nothing about
Worth mentioning.... those unfiltered diac/triac dimmers are INCREDIBLY noisy. Put a mis-tuned AM radio nearby to check. In some locations they’re illegal to use due to the noise they generate!
I just got three of these but without cases, was going to reverse engineer them myself before making cases for them. Guess it don't have to draw out the circuit now do I. lol. Thanks mate.
I work in a factory that makes elevator fixtures, you're using the same "special equipment" I use. Dodgy wire cutters and a self-bought box knife makes you a professional.
Literally the same ciurcuits can be found in drill speed regulators, just in a different case and with linear potentiometers.
It also literally burns out the same way, too. These are really only for incandescent lamps since there is an implicit connection to the neutral through the filament to properly charge the RC network and fire the triac. It would work better if the neutral was also hooked up because then you could properly terminate the RC network rather than do it through the load.
I like the lamp holder used that one can change the lens. Do you have a source or supplier for that versatile lamp? Wonder if its available with an E27 base.
My guess for the slit in the two AC solder points is to keep the hole unclogged, so you can thread the wire thru from the component side after pretinning.
Could the gaps in the pads be there to stop the hole filling with solder in production?
Good point.
@Dave Micolichek ...
Big Clive, you did not install the wires correctly. The circuit board has anti stress holes for a reason. (Safety) The wire is mounted threw the un-tinted side and then soldered to the tinted wire board connect. By mounting and soldering wire threw hole this way keeps some yahoo from pulling wire lose from the circuit board and causing severe injury, or even death. I know you already know this. But, by you doing the soldering job in this manner in the video would give someone the opinion that this is a safe practice because Big Clive did it this way so it must be safe. Right? I hope this does not sound bad. That was not my intention to sound haughty. Thank you for your time in the production of these mini doc's.
@Matt Quinn Your right about this product being trash. Thank you for your time.
Kindly advise which type of dimmer is suitable for the coffee machine pump (AC 48W 230V vibratory pump)? Thanks
I'm sure some people have put unsuitable LED bulb with that dimmer and blew the triac. Would it be possible to protect the triac from spikes using a capacitor?
bigclivedotcom can you explain why live and neutral is referred to as such if polarity does not matter in AC?
Lamp cord over here looks more like mid grade speaker wire: it's easy to cut one side and zip them apart a little on both sides of the cut.
In europe all mains cables have to be double-insulated. (2 separate layers of insulation ) That makes it safer because it is much harder to cut straight into the copper or otherwise break the insulation and expose live conductors.
@@Basement-Science We used to have figure 8 mains wire in Europe too, guess the mandatory double isolation of ungrounded devices made those illegal.
@@johncrowerdoe5527 I dont know when that became mandatory in which country.
@@johncrowerdoe5527 Figure 8 cable was quite popular in Soviet countries also._
@Matt Quinn Oh it's "perfectly safe."
Unless you pull it pretty hard or chew on it or melt it or leave it in the sun or near a light bulb for a few decades and then flex it.
@16:36 Very true. I actually had a capacitor in a capacitive dropper-powered LED bulb (in a table lamp) literally puke it's guts out (It looked like if some molten gray lava had spilled on the PCB) because I didn't realize that the dimmer in the table lamp wasn't fully off (it was a touch dimmer) and left the poor LED bulb running for a very long time. I later modified the table lamp and removed the dimmer.
Its amazing how you can make a 500K linear pot used as a rheostat with some pink plastic on it and a switch so interesting and entertaining. Clive you are completely nuts.
and "Nanofarts". ROFL.
As a Heathkit builder from age 13 (I'm 63), the quality of the stuff Clive gets on eBay is just crap.
It's meant to be crap so we don't go out and buy the same crap.
Bob - Yes but they make great Chinese fireworks.
@Reno Simpson - I live in Canada and we have fluoride in our water. Is my faucet going to explode? I hope not. :-)
@@robinbrowne5419 you're all going to get mind controlled then become Alex Jones viewers.
@@crimsonhalo13 - Hmmm.. sounds like you've been watching too much Alex Jones. But actually I do enjoy watching Alex Jones sometimes. :-)
The types of aftermarket dimmers that used to use were the ones that were just a plug adapter with a knob on them. The type you plug into a socket whereafter you just plug the lamp cord into it.
I think the lamp wires are supposed to go in AND out of same end of the dimmer, eliminating the wires across pointy solder/pins.
Was there any info included at all?
A leading edge dimmer for resistive loads. Trailing edge, or electronic dimmers, is what you need for capacitive loads. Can you look at one of these next Clive?
I was waiting for you to test dimmable LED lamps on it BUT CLIVE BROKE IT! ;)
Any chance we could get a BigClive teardown and schematic of a reverse phase dimmer.
Excellent as always!
It would be nice to see more of your old controller designs.
BigClive and random shit from ebay name a better duo
Vocals are very soft in this video, compared to the rest of your videos. Cheers for the content!
Thank goodness for this video! So, it's not just me finding it is not very consumer-friendly... I'll have a go now that I have instructions, eh. Fortunately mine has holes to thread the wires through and tie them into place so no need to solder. Phew!
I got one of these and it works fine for a small lamp
BC, you Are the Terminator.
I'm watching this because I've just bought a similar module. It was far more informative than I anticipated. I expected a simple install guide. I don't know why you didn't try rotating the circuit board 90 degrees, so the connector pair lies along the unit rather than across it?
I suspect that is aimed more at the lamp cord style cable where you can see like 2 wires barely attached together with a wimpy middle rubber molding vs the round jacket style you have there.
I can't do this with mine. Mine is slightly different and I can't fit my big American wire in it. Our wires don't have another thinner insulation layer inside like yours. Everythings thick and not very flexible and I can't find a way to fit the wire in the housing properly.
Is it possible to lower the low setting voltage by increasing the capacitor capacitance?_
Why does your plug in have three prongs if it has no ground? Is that just so you don't mix up the polarity?
Keep the case and put a more interesting circuit in it.
ah, my words ! such a nice case ... :)
I have a cheap rework station from ebay the 825d and the display isn't giving me any information. It lights up a bit funny and the iron and the hot air both work. Has anyone got a clue what's popped?
I think that's pretty much the "temperature control" circuit in my Rapid Electronics soldering iron station, just a glorified dimmer switch circuit, only I think the iron has suppression to keep the Spam radio types appeased... :P
Weird I had forgotten about this RUclips says I've watched it and I've liked it. What's so weird it was a suggested video on the right side and I was just looking for one of these on eBay well not quite one of these but wondering if I should get one of these instead.
I was given a heating pad that the fancy digital controller had malfunctioned my plan was to just cut it off and buy a in-line cord dimmer for a lamp where I can shove the cords in and squeeze the things down but I can't find them anymore at my local stores or Ebay. So I either need something with a screwdriver or soldering = more time involved.
So i'm curious if it's possible to rotate the PCB by 90° or whether they maybe mounted it wrong to begin with, so one might be able to avoid the wire contortionism inside the case there. Not that i have any practical reason to be curious of that, was just a thought.
It dopes appear to fit in that way, making the wiring more sensible.
my first thought was the same: they design an in-line switch with such a bad connecting? the PCB is almost square, this must be assembled wrong. but you may never know...
I bought some LED lighting strips, and they had the exact same dimmer case, in black, conatining a 12V dimmer.
Us radio hams do still use the bands those things cause interface with. There's a lot of noisy consumer devices around today like this one and cheap switch mode power supplies where the manufacturer leaves out the filtering. The noise levels at my house make operating below 30mhz almost impossible even when I operate off battery power and kill the mains at the consumer unit. On 70MHz if my cat triggers my led flood lights the noise from those things is deafening if I have headphones on. Even up on UHF at 432Mhz I can't hear much to the north west as someone in that direction has something spewing out RF. One of the worst offenders today is BT VDSL broadband. The high switching speed and overhead cables makes it radiate rather well. The noise and the fact that were in a low spot in the solar cycle means it's best to operate portable from a very remote area away from all the guff you find in a residential area.
These switches are worth their weight in gold for making a cheap lamp dimmable
I've found this exact same dimmer in a lava lamp, the resistor underneath the potentiometer was burnt out and I couldn't read what it was supposed to be, so I instinctively replaced it for a 10K one. It was a pain in the ass to replace. Worked like a charm afterwards. Had to re-solder the cable because it was really poorly done, and I think because of that, it was bridging some paths and that's what caused the resistor to burn out. That little plastic case was so annoying to take apart and put back together, especially cause mine didn't have screw holes, it just clamped together. Oh, and I could NOT find a circuit diagram for it anywhere. Really unfortunate that I didn't find this video when I needed it. 10K should be fine, right?
I work in an EMC lab; it is more likely to fail the conducted emissions than the radiated emissions tests.
Great to see someone else's dyslexia in action, writing the 2 before the T and then having to cross it out. I've been doing that all my life
Great work, Clive, I always enjoy your vids. 2 pounds out the window, but there's a 2 pound lesson here.. don't try and dim lamps with _capacitive droppers!_ There's the difference between LED bulbs that are "dimmable" and those that are not. Some more robust dimmers can withstand this type of feedback, but many will get hurt by it... some instantly, some just have shortened lifespans. Thank Clive for warning you. He _may_ just save you 2 pounds (or $2).
Or in the case of 2 pounds that would be $4
Would you be interested in looking at a multimeter from the 40s? It still works.
I love watching bigclive's brain go "you should try that" in the middle of a sentence.
I would like the choice or atleast the ability to replace to transparent cases for EVERYTHING!
It looks like it was meant for what is sold in the US as lampcord. Two conductors each with a single layer of insulation that are held together by a thin web of insulation.
Why do triac based dimmers make so much RF noise? they're being powered by standard wall output, so shouldn't be switching much over twice wall frequency, which is many orders of magnitude below radio range?
the best dimmer is a variac, expensive, and heavy, but very good at what it does
We radio amateurs are loving the new SDRs such as the Icom IC-7300, but yes, man made noise is a real problem in an urban setting