LED interference

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spark master

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I put LED bulbs in my garage door opener. It's a Marantec opener. This unit holds 3 bulbs. I put in 60 watt LED equivalents. All the sudden the remote stopped working consistently. The keypad outside the door stopped working. A lot of intermittent problems. I realized most of the problems were when the lights were on.

I pulled the LED's and went back to A-lamp incandescents. Bingo, problem resolved.

Never had an LED cause interference before, but I'm disappointed I can't save money on my electric bill.

I may try compact fluorescents next. Hopefully the ballast is not as noisy as the LED driver.
 
I'm curious. ..

Did the bulbs flicker or act erratically in any way?

Would you be willing to drag an extension cord and lamp out there, put the led bulb in the lamp and see if it still interferes with the opener?
 
spark master said:
I put LED bulbs in my garage door opener. It's a Marantec opener. This unit holds 3 bulbs. I put in 60 watt LED equivalents. All the sudden the remote stopped working consistently. The keypad outside the door stopped working. A lot of intermittent problems. I realized most of the problems were when the lights were on.

I pulled the LED's and went back to A-lamp incandescents. Bingo, problem resolved.

Never had an LED cause interference before, but I'm disappointed I can't save money on my electric bill.

I may try compact fluorescents next. Hopefully the ballast is not as noisy as the LED driver.
Click to expand...
. Cheapest LEDs you could find or Name Brand?
 
160219-1614 EST

Try some Cree bulbs. Their reliability may not be good, but new ones seem to have nearly a sine wave shape for their current when not dimmed. Feit bulbs I show waveforms for may produce a lot of low and high frequency noise.

See my posts #41 and beyond at http://forums.mikeholt.com/showthread.php?t=174603&page=2

You may need to read earlier posts, before #41, in the thread to have background for the comments I made.

.
 
160219-2411 EST

spark master:

Home Depot carries Cree and Feit.

Without a scope you won't be able to look at LED current waveforms. But you can possibly use an AM broadcast band radio to test for relative noise from different LEDs.

Buy 1 60 W equivalent Cree. Install this with two incandescent bulbs. See if there is any interference to either a radio or your door controller. If no interference try two, and then three.

Report back. Also see if a radio detects noise from your present LEDs.

.
 
Fluorescents can cause similar problems. Had to change the bedroom ceiling fan bub from CFL back to incandescent as the CFL produced enough interference to disrupt the Wii's wireless ability.
 
spark master said:
...I'm disappointed I can't save money on my electric bill...
Click to expand...

After the cost of the LED lamp, and considering that the lamps are off for 99.9% of the day, how much were you thinking you were going to save?

The garage door lamps in my openers have been working for almost 10 years, so longevity doesn't seem to be that much of a factor. My openers are used on average twice a day.

I will stick to incandescent lamps for my openers.
 
tkb said:
After the cost of the LED lamp, and considering that the lamps are off for 99.9% of the day, how much were you thinking you were going to save?

The garage door lamps in my openers have been working for almost 10 years, so longevity doesn't seem to be that much of a factor. My openers are used on average twice a day.

I will stick to incandescent lamps for my openers.
Click to expand...

Similar to buying a Prius to save on gas, when you walk to work.
 
After all this talk about garage door opener lamps, I noticed that one is out on one of my openers. 10 years, not bad.

I went to HD this morning looking for the garage door opener lamps and the guy there was trying to push LED lamps on me.

I told him that I wasn't going waste my money on a LED that wouldn't last as long as the incandescent and might interfere with the opener.

He said that there is no way that an LED would interfere and the LED would last forever.
I have seen many LED lamps fail way before their advertised life.

I'm still not wasting money on an LED that will be off 99.9% of the day.
 
tkb said:
He said that there is no way that an LED would interfere and the LED would last forever.
I have seen many LED lamps fail way before their advertised life.
Click to expand...

No way, you mean to tell me cheap components on a printed circuit board aren't going to last forever? :p
 
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