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Scenario

I have a 110V line in my kitchen with 4 LED lights and a toggle on-off switch (no dimmer.) The lights have steady power and everything behaves normally EXCEPT there is a one-time flicker of ~1/10 second about 3-5 minutes after turning the lights on.

To recap:

  • lights manually turned on
  • steady power
  • one-time simultaneous flicker after 3-5 minutes
  • continued steady power
  • lights manually turned off
  • Rinse and repeat.

The power is good throughout the home, there's no brown-outs or otherwise bad power in this area (suburbs of a 1mil+ metro) and no other line from the breaker box performs this way. From the people I've talked to so far the best consensus I can come up with is to swap out the LED bulbs as they may be the culprit.

Question

  1. How can I better troubleshoot this?
  2. If I change the bulbs what should I be aware of to ensure there won't be this seemingly 1-off flicker?

Update:

After recording the lights for minutes of time a few times it appears that the flicker happens continuously separate by stretches of time. Over time the flickers become shortened and less noticeable until they are undetectable by the human eye.

At this point I'm going to rule the issue to be temperature of the light bulb where colder temperature results in noticeable flickering. Especially now that we are in fall and temperatures have dropped this is more noticeable.

6
  • See this answer: electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/585503/…
    – user1850479
    Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 18:29
  • 2
    Did they always to that? Are they new? If so, return them to the store as defective.
    – Davide Andrea
    Commented Sep 28, 2021 at 19:10
  • A friend and I swapped homes for the time being. They said they hadn't ever really notice the issue. I'm going to research this a bit deeper but it sounds like the bulbs are the lowest common denominator in this case. Cheers!
    – Jacksonkr
    Commented Sep 29, 2021 at 15:28
  • What make and model are the bulbs in question? Commented Oct 1, 2021 at 0:54
  • I have some LED shop lights in my garage. The colder it is outside (the garage is unheated), the more they flicker and the longer they flicker when I turn them on. After they've been on a few minutes, they stop. It might just be temperature related.
    – FreeMan
    Commented Oct 1, 2021 at 14:03

1 Answer 1

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Ultimately the culprit was a single led bulb that was starting to fail.

It really shouldn't have been this tricky to narrow down but with a little help from slow-mo video recording (iphone) I was able to narrow it down.

Cheers all

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