Hi,
2 weeks ago, a dimmer broke: It’s a VMBDM1 that I bought about 8 years ago. It drives 3 Philips “Warm Glow” dimmable LED bulbs (usa.philips.com/c-m-li/warm- … d-lighting), together with one 35W traditional halogen light. The remaining edison was required to have enough load. Dimming worked very well for about 1,5 year now - up to now.
Bad luck never comes alone: Today - all of a sudden another set of lights connected to a VMBDME started to blink and slowly faded out seconds later. The smell of a broken condensator came out of the VMBDME…
That VMBDME controls 4 edison light bulbs of 60W. It’s running for about 5 years now - since the replacement of the VMBDM1 by Velleman. Indeed, it is already a replacement for a faulty VMBDM1.
5 years is quite some time, but I assume that a dimmer should have a much longer life spam… In the mean time the VMBDME is also deprecated, so it should be replaced by a VMBDMI(-R). May be I also swap the edison bulbs for 230V LEDs, so I guess a VMBDMI-R is the better option?
8 years ago, I bought 4 VMBDM1s. 2 where faulty in 2 years of use. Those were replaced by Velleman at no cost, because the VMBDM1 had indeed some problems. I also still have a working original VMBDM1. Apart from the 2 replacements, the system is working flawless for 8 years now, up to 2 weeks ago - with 2 extra broken dimmers: Now I have a 3rd faulty VMBDM1 AND a faulty 5 year old VMBDME.
@Velleman: Correct me when I’m wrong, but 4 faulty dimmers in 8 years is not what I call a reliable system …
My setup for all 4 dimmers: 3 of them are on 230V edison bulbs and 230V halogen bulbs. One is on a combination of 1 x 230V halogen + 3 x 230V leds (see above). All are within the required power range (<400W) and conform the installation instructions.
Looking forward to your opinion on this.
Best regards,
Gert