Here you can see three lighting dimmers that are available. So the one on the left, the blue one, is a Diginet dimmer by a company called Gerard Lighting. It requires a minimum of 2 watts to operate, and a maximum load of 400 watts to operate, so you just have to be careful if it’s an LED strip or something running at a very low wattage, it might not work. Up to 400 watts, so if you’re standard LED light is 10 watts, you could effectively put up to 40 on there. The main advantage this dimmer has over all the other ones on the market is it has a filter to stop the lights flickering when the line voltage ripple signal is injected during the off-peak period. This is a very common problem with LED lighting, and there’s been a good amount of success when the Diginet dimmer has been used.
The next one along is by SAO Lighting. It’s a push button dimmer. I guess one advantage of this is you don’t require a switch as well as a dimmer. You just tap on, tap off, to turn it on and off. And hold it down to dim it up or down. Similar load rating as the Diginet one, 2 watts minimum and 350 watts maximum. One feature it does have, you can program it for the maximum and minimum amount of brightness you require.
The next one along is a Clipsal universal dimmer. Its minimum load is 10 watt, maximum 450 watt. So it can take a bit more load, but it’s not really an LED dimmer. Clipsal does have a LED one out now, but this universal one, it covers most other lighting loads, but it cannot be used for fluoros [SP]. The one advantage over the others, you can use it as a fan controller.
Here you can see the Clipsal lighting dimmer and the Clipsal 2 Gang Switch. So what we need to do to install the dimmer, is remove one of the switch mechanisms and put the dimmer into where it was. And just use your pliers to pop that out. As you’ll see, the dimmer just clips in nice and firm. You’ll see on the back of the light switch here there are a few different terminals. So the one in the middle there, that’s your common terminal, that’s where your permanent power supply goes. It’s always 240 volts. The one next to it, that’s your switch line. So the cable that would normally go in there is the one that goes out to turn your lights on. So you flip the switch on, these two terminals then come in contact with each other and you have the power supply going out to the lights.
Now, because we’re using a dimmer, we want the power supply to go through that first before it gets to the lights. So one of the tails, it doesn’t matter which one, goes into that first terminal. You probably can’t see it on this video, it will have a “1” next to it. Okay, so the other one, what you’ll do with that, this one here, that gets connected with your switch line going out to your light. You can either put in a BP connector or that one there is actually a looping terminal which you could also put it into. So once all that’s done, your cover just goes back on and you have your little dimmer knob on as well, and there you go. That’s what it will look like on your wall.
