Dimmer Channel Randomly Flickering

Hello everyone,

I am having some issues at my venue, one of those issues is our house lights randomly flickering. Our house lights are divided into 10 different channels, each controlling a different section of the auditorium. We have two zones with sconces on House Left and House Right with dimmable LED light bulbs. Out of the 384 channels, both the house left sconces and house right sconces are flickering and getting worse by the day. Sometimes all 10-12 bulbs on the zone will flicker at the same time, or they will individually flash at different times/rates/etc (all the same bulbs) We noticed if the dimmer is at 100%, they flicker excessively, if we have them set at 99%, they barely ever flicker, and completely stop flashing at 97%. The house lights are on a group, so when we turn it on, it turns on the sconces and the LED cans, they all have the same amount of use.

I strongly believe the power cube in the two dimmers is bad or going bad. My question is out of the 384 channels we have, why these two? Why not any of our other house lights (LED cans with dimmer modules)? We have spare dimmers we could hot-swap (we can't power down without contacting facilities, which would take months). Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

Equipment: Sensor 3, CEM 3, Dimmer Modules, Paradigm, ION Console

  • You can flip breakers & swap modules of the same type (D20) and flip back on to see if the issue follows the module or the slot.

    If it follows the module, then you know where the problem is.   If it follows the slot then it could be the wiring external to the rack or within the rack such as the CEM or the backplane, or even control related.

  • If you have the make/model of LED and driver, you can call factory support and see if they have tested the product, and what the correct settings are for the dimmer rack.   It might possible to enter into rack settings and change the dimmer curve to adjust for led behavior.  That would fix the problem for both Console and Paradigm.

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