I have some experience with house wiring, and more recently gained some experience with 5mm RGB LEDs and an Ardiuno.
In that, I learned about PWM for dimming an LED.
I suspect that the standard wall dimmer an electrician installs is just a variable resistor. I could understand that doing weird stuff if there is some transformer or something in the non-dimmable led lamp.
I found that you can get solid state relays for an Ardiuno that can handle 250V AC and 2 amps. Since they are solid state, I suspect I could turn them on and off fast.
What happens if I PWM a standard "non-dimmable" LED lamp? Is there some complicated circuitry (that I don't yet understand or know of) that will interact poorly with a PWM power source?
(That does bring me to realize that for the PWM to work well, it should operate at a speed that doesn't have any weird "Lowest Common Multiple" effects with the AC supply that would be visible).
Best Answer
Incorrect. That would get very hot and waste power. Dimmers use triacs to adjust the fraction of time that the AC is allowed through.
Figure 1. Phase angle control of AC used in standard incandescent lamp dimmers. As switch-on point is delayed power is reduced.
You could turn them on once per mains half cycle. They would then remain on until the next zero-cross.
It will probably fail as the internal power supply is not designed for chopped supply voltage.
Yes, quite a bit of both.
For more on this subject see my answers to