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A lot of new LED bulbs claim they work on standard dimmers. Bought a bunch of the Philips Slim Style Dimmable LEDs when they were on sale at Home Depot. They work fairly well on dimmers that were already in the wall. Not sure what type of dimmers they are. Just the standard slide dimmers you'd get cheap at the hardware store.

Not very familiar with the technology used in these types of bulbs. My main point in dimming them is to reduce the amount of light but I'm wondering if dimming these will reduce the amount of energy used and if so how much? I understand dimming incandescent bulbs doesn't save as much as you might think compared to the light output.

Also would dimming these bulbs lessen their life span?

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Yes, dimmers reduce energy consumption of dimmable LEDs. Unlike incandescent bulbs, the electricity used is fairly linear with the light output; at 50% brightness it should use roughly 50% of the power.

Generally speaking, dimming will allow the bulbs to run cooler and extend their life spans. There may be some exceptions for some particular bulbs with particular kinds of dimmers, however, LEDs advertised as "dimmable" should not have any problems.

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    Yep. My living room lights (16 small bulbs in a chandelier-like fixture) runs about 75W at full brightness, 35W at the level I normally run, as measured by a plug-in wattmeter of the kill-a-watt type.
    – keshlam
    Commented Feb 3, 2015 at 0:25
  • Can you provide any documentation, or other supporting evidence to corroborate your claims?
    – Tester101
    Commented Feb 3, 2015 at 11:18
  • Sure, this has some good info: lightbased.com/files/White_Papers/Facts_About_Dimming.pdf
    – Zhentar
    Commented Feb 3, 2015 at 16:18

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