- May 20, 2011
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- If you're a qualified, trainee, or retired electrician - Which country is it that your work will be / is / was aimed at?
- United Kingdom
- What type of forum member are you?
- Practising Electrician (Qualified - Domestic or Commercial etc)
- Business Name
- Circitas Ltd
Has anyone had problems with Varilight V-Pro grid dimmers?
I've had enough, installation so far has cost me 4 call-outs (unpaid) and now I'm upset to keep annoying my customer, it will probably cost me another £100 in parts to swap out the Varilight and replace with (probably) MK.
Installation all tested out OK beforehand.
Set-up is Varilight V-pro intelligent grid dimmer, dimming 4 Varilight dimmable CFL. (Specs allow me to use up to eight Varilight lamps)
All nice at installation time, the dimmers needed to be re-set (They have a processor on board) to cater for the CFL's, all the instructions work, a series of on/off on the switch/knob. After a re-set the dimmers are said to detect the load and set up accordingly. This works great initially, and they dim really very well, silent and smooth -until maybe a week later...when they don't.
The blasted things seem to keep restoring themselves to default state, and customer keeps calling me up to say lights aren't dimming. (In default state, they are I guess OK for incandescents maybe, but no good for the Dimmable CFL's)
So that happened four times now. The latest call-out where I successfully re-set one room using the dimmer knob sequence, (two rooms with 4 lamps each), to find that the second room is unable to work at all, won't re-set, and just flickers and goes on & off randomly. I spent half an hour fiddling, but that unit, but now it won't accept programming mode.
I don't want to bad-mouth a system if it could be a one-off quality issue, (the final seemingly hard failure might be), but the frequent re-setting points to some sort of generic susceptibility problem or perhaps EMC issue.
Like I said, I think I've had enough of these. I don't believe it's any conventional issue with the installation, but it may be worth seeing if anyone else has had the same problem.
I've had enough, installation so far has cost me 4 call-outs (unpaid) and now I'm upset to keep annoying my customer, it will probably cost me another £100 in parts to swap out the Varilight and replace with (probably) MK.
Installation all tested out OK beforehand.
Set-up is Varilight V-pro intelligent grid dimmer, dimming 4 Varilight dimmable CFL. (Specs allow me to use up to eight Varilight lamps)
All nice at installation time, the dimmers needed to be re-set (They have a processor on board) to cater for the CFL's, all the instructions work, a series of on/off on the switch/knob. After a re-set the dimmers are said to detect the load and set up accordingly. This works great initially, and they dim really very well, silent and smooth -until maybe a week later...when they don't.
The blasted things seem to keep restoring themselves to default state, and customer keeps calling me up to say lights aren't dimming. (In default state, they are I guess OK for incandescents maybe, but no good for the Dimmable CFL's)
So that happened four times now. The latest call-out where I successfully re-set one room using the dimmer knob sequence, (two rooms with 4 lamps each), to find that the second room is unable to work at all, won't re-set, and just flickers and goes on & off randomly. I spent half an hour fiddling, but that unit, but now it won't accept programming mode.
I don't want to bad-mouth a system if it could be a one-off quality issue, (the final seemingly hard failure might be), but the frequent re-setting points to some sort of generic susceptibility problem or perhaps EMC issue.
Like I said, I think I've had enough of these. I don't believe it's any conventional issue with the installation, but it may be worth seeing if anyone else has had the same problem.
