Control4's new ELV dimmers?

[Billiam]

In my kitchen I have 18 Halogen cans in the ceiling - they're connected to a dimmer on one side of the room and a switch on the other side. So I can turn the lights on or off from either side and dim them from one - a common 2 way connection. I've been using 35Watt MR16 bulbs and now I want to replace them with energy saving 9 watt LED bulbs. I've found some that are actually pretty bright (310 lumens!) I would save about 450 watts for hours and hours each day!

I tried replacing a couple bulbs with the LEDs to test them. I knew I couldn't dim them, just on fully on or off, but they each died within a week. I was told it was the fault of those types of dimmers. LEDS don't do well with normal in-wall dimmers. Fair enough. BUT now I see Control4 offers new fangled ELV dimmers that "..are designed to work with Compact Fluorescent (CFL) and LED lighting that utilize electronic low-voltage transformers (ELV)."

If I replace the dimmer with one of these special dimmers and the other side with a regular 2 button keypad will this work? (I know I have to remove the load from the second switch. I'm just asking about the dimmer working with these types of lights.)

[Cyknight]

Well the ELV has been around for a LONG time now.

The first question is are the lights low voltage.

NO use a C4 switch (you mentioned they are not dimmable anyway)

YES then do they operate on ELV or MLV transformers.

MLV use a switch (this seems to be the case for you by the way)

ELV use an ELV dimmer

[Godzilla]

I have tried replacing a 60 watt bulb for a dimmable cfl and could not get it to work with a c4 dimmer (not ELV).

I have tried the same with a LED dimmable bulb and was able to dim the bottom 80%, with an ELV dimmer I was able to dim the bottom 85-90%

Is this consistent with others testings?

Both were like I said replacing bulb in a std 120v socket

[Cyknight]

The problem in part is that there are many types of bulbs for 120v socket using different technologies. The ELV and the normal Dimmer use different forms, so in some cases the ELV can work slightly better range wise, sometimes the dimmers will. On one occasion an ELV dimmer would not turn of the lights all the way whereas the normal dimmer did.

When it comes to dimmable LEDs end CFLs (in standard sockets) it's more or less a case by case scenario, although the normal dimmer seems to be the "safe" way to do it. For these types of installs, we generally set the dimmer to have a minimum on level or around 20%.

Technically the ELV dimmer is ONLY for ELV transformer dimmer - no other application is officially supported that I'm aware.