Submitted by The_Duke_of_Ted t3_116eb3z in DIY
I have an old home with old (safe, well-insulated) wiring. LED bulbs flicker and incandescent are getting harder to find. Obviously the ideal solution is to have an electrician rewire the whole house but I don’t want to drop that kind of money yet, if ever. Do fluorescent bulbs flicker the way LEDs do? Are there any other options?
We have a house built in the 80s and had this problem with LEDs too. We tried a bunch of different ones and eventually found a GE one that didn’t flicker.
This is good to know; I’ve got one flickering so need to be ready to replace I guess!
Make sure you aren't using an LED in an enclosed fixture unless it is rated for it. Heat is a killer of LEDs and electronics in general.
Could also be other devices on the circuit causing the flicker, as well as a shared neutral. My kitchen lights are on a dimmer and cause the living room LEDs to flicker/pulse when they're dimmed. Lots of issues with neutral and ground wires in this house and I remember that box being funky when I opened it.
You should figure out what's going on.
First I'd check what voltage you're getting at the panel and at the fixture. Sometimes you're at the end of a run and it's on the low side at the hookup. There could also be an issue with a connection somewhere that's causing voltage to sag. These are simple sanity checks that you can do with a multimeter or have an electrician check it out. If the voltage is below nominal, it exacerbates flickering/dimming issues.
If it's just a one or a few circuits, you need to figure out what else is on those circuits that could be causing the issue. Lights should be on their own circuits, simply so the lights don't go off when a breaker trips, but older homes tend to share. Like I have a room that dims whenever I go to print something. Some devices feed back 'noisy' power back into the circuit which can mess up the little DC power supplies in LED bulbs. You may have some circuits on inadequate wire gauge.
Fixing the circuits is ideal, but better LED bulbs will help a lot. They have more sophisticated DC power supply designs that are less sensitive to voltage sag and ripple. Also, consider dedicated LED fixtures vs. bulbs. The fixtures can have much better thermal designs and don't need to cram the power supply into tiny spaces. They are fundamentally better designs.
I had a similar problem, and while I was trying to sort it out one day a lineman with the power company stopped by and asked for access to a power pole on my property. He told me that there was a cracked insulator and as we talked he said that if I was using any LED bulbs one of the symptoms would be the lights flickering. It took him about twenty minutes to make the repair and I've had no problems since. Hope this helps, good luck.
It's very difficult to overheat an LED in an enclosed fixture. Typically the smallest fixture you're going to find would be designed with a 20-40 watt incandescent in mind. That is a lot of LED power! An ungodly powerful domestic floodlight is around 60 watts of LED.
Small LEDs, the kind which would fit in a very low-power restrictive fixture, would be running at less than five watts.
LED's will flicker as they go out - u/Diligent_Nature is correct. Causes are many but failure rates are higher in older model LED's and LED's that have been in use for a long time.
Change the bulbs with other LED's before you get an electrician.
There's two considerations. One is the fixture rating. An LED will certainly meet that because it is much lower power. The other is the temperature of the LED bulb. They rely on convection and radiation to cool. LEDs are far more efficient than incandescents but still only about 35% efficient. The other 65% is dissipated as heat. Many LEDs will overheat in an enclosed fixture.
Ditto this. I had a motion detection switch in my garage that made lights flicker after a few years. A new one fixed it.
p.s. Motion detection light switches all pretty much suck, imho.
Diligent_Nature t1_j9652ue wrote
LEDs flicker when they are failing or when driven by incompatible dimmers and other electronic controls. Your house wiring is probably fine. If it was bad it would be bad for any type of light. Fluorescent bulbs can also be incompatible with dimmers and electronic controls.