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- Jan 2, 2014
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Sliding it upwards increases the brightness of the light . Therefore
it is not decreasing power but increasing it, ergo, this curcuit does not work for what I want.
Ahhhh, but sliding it down does dim the lights! Right?
The light dimmer cannot truly "add power to the outlet" what with those pesky thermodynamic laws and all.
Think of it like this:
If your dining room lights had just a simple on/off toggle switch, they would either be OFF (no brightness/no power) or ON (full brightness/full power).
All the dimmer is doing is giving you a range of brightness/power somewhere between OFF and ON as selected by the slider/knob.
It does this by allowing the load (the lights in this case) to only get power for a certain amount of time.....some fraction of the 60Hz cycle.
It does not change the maximum amplitude of the voltage supplied to the load, just the amount of time the load gets power.
It's like a little man throwing the toggle switch on and off really fast.....so fast you can't see it!
Once turned on, those lights look like a simple resistive load. They pull some amount of current based on their resistance.
Your "heating element only" soldering iron will also look like a simple resistive load.
You should be able to control the heat of your soldering iron very well with this approach.
(........as long as you follow the advice in post #3 above)
-brino
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