The electrical industry came up with the perfect light switch over 60 years ago: a plastic thing you flick up to turn on and down to turn off. You can see by looking at it which lights are on and off. You can feel in the dark how to turn one on and off. For dimming, the switch evolved so at the bottom of travel it positively clicks off and the rest of the travel changes the dimming level; you can still see at a glance how close it is to full brightness.
Clueless designers have messed this up for decades. The Lutron Decora switch has a big clean panel, but you can’t see if it’s up or down. Designers made rotary switches (more effort to turn full on or off), and separated the on-off function from the dimmer slider (looks ugly, can’t feel in the dark, more effort for no reward). Then designers made it worse with presets, memory, and columns of tiny LEDs to suggest how bright the light is (I have eyes!! I can see how bright it is). Then, years before smartphones, they added tap functionality. The switch is now a featureless rectangle, with actions {turn on to last setting, max brightness, decrease brightness, increase brightness, quick off} randomly assigned to {tap, double tap, press and hold, tap and hold, triple tap, stand on one foot and smear peanut butter on switch}. If the light is dim and you want it brighter you wind up tapping and holding like a drunken Morse code operator. I visited a fancy venture capitalist’s high-end home and the light switches in its entrance hall had printed instruction labels next to them!
When we remodeled our house we had to fight to get the platonic kind of switch. We got toggle dimmers for incandescent lights but the electrician said the model that we specified doesn’t work with low-voltage lights. So we had a mix of ideal switches and Lutron’s Ariadni switch with a separate dimmer slider (which makes the on-off switch thinner, flimsier, and uglier).
Perfection lost
That was 2006. I recently replaced some more MR16 halogens with LEDs, and they don’t work well with the Ariadni dimmers which are designed for magnetic transformers: most of the travel does nothing and then the LED pops on and barely dims. So once again I tried to get the unimproveable perfect light switch, and I failed. Searching for “toggle dimmer wallswitch” mostly didn’t work, just like my iron search; I scrolled through dozens of results before managing to find actual toggle dimmers by GE and Leviton for sale by Home Depot and Walmart… and both were discontinued.
AI hallucinates help
I asked Claude.ai about this, and it kept suggesting specific light switches using all the terrible designs. I got pretty fed up:
ME: No. I don’t want touch, double-tap, memory, or anything else. And it’s not a “three-way” switch. GE called it a “toggle on/off dimmer switch,” but it was for incandescents and is discontinued. Oh well.
Claude: I understand now – you’re looking for an actual mechanical toggle switch that physically moves through positions for off, dimmed, and full brightness, similar to the discontinued GE toggle on/off dimmer for incandescents.
You’re right that these have become quite rare for LEDs. The older mechanical toggle dimmers worked well with incandescent bulbs because their dimming method (typically using a simple triac circuit) was compatible with resistive loads. LED bulbs, being electronic devices rather than simple resistive loads, require different dimming technologies.
The closest modern equivalents I can think of would be:
- Lutron Skylark Contour – has a slide dimmer with a push button at the bottom, not exactly a toggle
- Cooper Wiring Devices AI106 – an older model that might still be compatible with some dimmable LEDs
…
Me: I think you hallucinated part AI106 from Cooper Wiring Devices, there’s no such product.
Claude: You’re right, and I apologize for the error. The “Cooper Wiring Devices AI106” I mentioned isn’t a real product – I made a mistake by providing incorrect information.
(Instead of hallucinating a non-existent light switch (code-named “AI“!) to meet my want, a truly helpful AI would have spat out a 3-D design for the right kind of light switch and contracted for its construction in China.)
