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Why do LED lights flicker when the fridge comes on?

spendlove

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Oct 22, 2019
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I'll be watching TV and have a lamp or two on at night. Then I hear the fridge kick on, and the LED lights in the lamps will flicker. Is this due to a fridge on its last leg? Or the fridge drawing too much power from my 3,000 watt Outback Power inverter, or something else?

Thanks!
 
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I have a similar experience on myside. I have a 3 phase central aircon unit that causes the led lights to briefly dim when it starts up.
 
I'll be watching TV and have a lamp or two on at night. Then I hear the fridge kick on, and the LED lights in the lamps will flicker. Is this due to a fridge on its last leg? Or the fridge drawing too much power from my 3,000 watt Outback Power inverter, or something else?

Thanks!

Your led lights are from Home Depot and they sick.
 
My guess - and this is only a guess, is that your fridge motor is a big inductive load, and the led lighting is sensitive to that now being on the rails.
 
My guess - and this is only a guess, is that your fridge motor is a big inductive load, and the led lighting is sensitive to that now being on the rails.

Some led bulbs are extremely sensitive to voltage inputs.

They literally dim with each compression stroke when the refrigerator compressor begins to rotate.
 
Will the quality of LED lights improve so they are not so sensitive? I hate using them, as they produce "dirty electricity" on the power line, but when every watt counts, living off-grid, you do what ya gotta do.
 
Do they constantly flicker while the fridge is on, or only when it first starts up?

Maybe another brand of bulb would be better? I have generally had better results with Philips LED bulbs than Feit (garbage) or Sylvania (ok, but setimes not great).
 
Well it's not the LEDs, it's the rest of the circuit that's driving them. LEDs run off of DC. Therefore there is a rectifier circuit made of diodes. Simply putting AC through diodes doubles the frequency of the waveform but still leaves 'peaks and valleys', so a capacitor is used to 'smooth' that. I am guessing the sizing of the capacitor is the main culprit here. But i have no formal electrical training outside of what you get as an auto mechanic so there might be more to it than that. The 'grid' is treated, as far as i can tell, as an 'infinite source' where you don't necessarily have to build a whole lot of tolerance into your designs for 'dirty power' (i.e. a bigger capacitor). The impact of other devices in a house on the source would be like a 'drop in the bucket' on the grid, but when the grid is JUST your inverter and your house, it's more like a teacup than a bucket, and small disturbances are more easily noticed.

This is my layman's understanding. ?

As for what to do about it, you could either try different LED fixtures, try modifying the LED driver circuits, or feed them from a different source. For example, if the only thing on a circuit is LED lighting, NO receptacles, and the total circuit power is <100w or in the low hundreds, you could just feed the lighting circuits from a tiny inverter or certain kinds of UPS, dedicated to just those circuits.
 
Mine are 2 strips, on their own circuit, w dimmers.
The solution I deemed not worth it: regulators for the exact purpose of dealing with that.
Over $100 each.
Mine dim and recover w fridge engagement.
Individual lights??
That's RV stuff, that I avoided from day 1 of my build.
 
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