Incorporating Mixed Loads On A Single Circuit

The Zano technical team share their tips for incorporating mixed loads on a single circuit.

As if LED dimming didn’t come with enough complications,add incandescent lamps into the mix and you’re asking for trouble. That is,unless you have the right dimmer for the job.

We already know that TRIAC, or analog, dimmers are incompatible with LED. Yet digital dimmers can be just as much of a pain when paired with incandescent lamps, especially if LED drivers are also present on the circuit.

Why don’t some digital dimmers like incandescent loads?
For many LED-specific dimmers, tungsten loads are just too heavy. If the load is too high, you’re likely to smoke the dimmer. Add LED and incandescent to a single dimming circuit and you could be in for a headache, especially if the LED drivers take up a higher wattage than advertised.

In fact, running incandescent and LED on the same dimming circuit could diminish the LED’s life expectancy, as the incandescent lamp draws more power than the LED.

How can you mix LED and incandescent?
While it might be difficult, it’s far from impossible. Zano’s ZBAR remote dimming pack is engineered to be much more robust than the average digital dimmer, and is capable of supporting much higher loads.

While the primary feature of the ZBAR Remote Dimming Pack is to support a high number of LED lamps on a single circuit, it also makes it a perfect problem-solver when it comes to mixing LED and incandescent lamps. Our ZGRIDLED is also capable of supporting mixed loads, but at a limited level.

The ZBARLED could be the solution to your mixed-load problem, but if you want to be certain before you install, our technical support team are on hand to answer any queries. We can also test the lamps you intend to use – be it LED or incandescent – against our products at our in-house testing facility.