Fixing my cheap and very noisy little Aliexpress triac LED dimmers.
- Quieting LED dimmers, done for now
I managed to fit the small inductor into the other dimmer. It fits, but only just.
Please don’t look at my shoddy soldering job. Also, I did tape it up to be safer.
This definitely lessened the chopping noise from my speakers, but unlike with the other dimmer, the noise is not gone entirely. I guess it’s because I tested the specific inductor with the other dimmer and lights, and because this dimmer runs right next to the amplifier.Still, the noise is much less than before and only noticeable because I know it’s there, and even then I can only hear it when I turn the volume way down. I might revisit this in the future, but for now, problem solved :)
- Quieting LED dimmers, first success
I dug out my box of random inductors and tried to quieten one of the LED dimmers today. Contrary to what I thought in my previous post, the coils actually worked best when installed in series between the dimmer and the LED load. Almost all the inductors I tried helped quieten the chopping noise heard on my headphone amp. One interestingly completely stopped the noise when dimmed at 0%/50%/100%, but was still slightly audible at the in-between settings:
Two of the inductors were able to completely remove the noise. This one, and a very similar looking one:
Yay, I can listen to my headphones and dim my lights at the same time now! I love simple solutions :)
The other inductor that removed all the noise looks very similar but it’s slightly smaller. I might actually be able to fit it into the other dimmer module, to solve the noise on my speaker amp.
- LED dimmer noise
My cheap AliExpress LED dimmers are noisy. Not audibly, but they output a lot of EMI (?).
One of my (triac?) dimmers has multiple Philips bulbs on it. When I turn it on, I can hear a loud chopping noise on my headphone amp.
Another dimmer is in the same socket as the amplifier for my speakers, and the cables run closely parallel to each other. When I use this dimmer, I can hear the same chopping noise on my speakers, and at a little lower volume I can hear it on my headphones too.
I’m thinking of modifying the dimmers by adding a coil to them. I’ve never used them before but I have a big box of de-soldered ones from when I first got a soldering iron and liked to disassemble things.
What I need, short of getting better dimmers, is probably a lamp debuzzing coil in series. There might not be enough space in the little dimmer modules to add an inductor, though. The dimmer running to multiple bulbs already has a junction box that I can put it in, so I can experiment with that one first. The coil should go on the load side (or at least not between the dimmer and the load).
I have no idea how to calculate the ideal inductance value, and I probably can’t even measure the inductance of the ones I have, so I should just experiment with a few different ones to see which solve the problem without affecting the dimming.