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Panel Lighting 1800 1970

Hi Dave. I did this exact conversion in my 1800ES several years ago so the details are foggy. Here's what I recall.....

I used this dimmer:
https://www.oznium.com/switches/led-dimmer-knob
It fit in the same location as the original and I was able to retain the original knob.

The bulbs were some sort T10 wedge base 5W that I don't see on that supplier's web sight any longer.

As Dave S mentioned, I found the bulbs to be polarity sensitive so I had to bench test them first and mark the + and - sides with red and black Sharpies. You may find some bulbs nowadays that aren't polarity sensitive.

Another, more unpleasant, surprise I ran up against was that I couldn't use the same bulb grounding method as the incandescents. The way I was told the LED dimmer works is that it sends a constant 480 hz signal to the bulbs. The dimmer varies the 480 hz wave shape which makes the LED dimmer or brighter. So I had to run a separate negative ground path from the bulbs back to the dimmer switch. I had a spare original instrument lighting "daisy chain" harness (red wires) so I rewickered it to add a negative wire running alongside the red wire back to the dimmer. Since the original harness is wrapped up with a much larger "main" harness I chose to just leave it disconnected and stowed up out of the way.

Hope this helps.






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New 1 Panel Lighting [1800][1970]
posted by  Dave B subscriber  on Wed Dec 27 11:31 CST 2023 >


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