Troubleshooting LED Light issues

Our Dwarven Forge LED pieces are great. Flickering torch lit hallways and the ominous, pulsing glow of a mysterious artifact can elevate a build from epic to legendary! But all that comes to a halt when a light doesn’t work and you're left wondering – what went wrong? Not to worry, this article will help you find the source of the problem so you can get the right piece replaced.

There can be a few causes for a light problem. Click on the links below, or keep reading for troubleshooting tips to answer each issue.

• Is the problem the Light or the Battery Unit (i.e., the wall/floor it’s plugged into)?
• Is the Light plugged in the right way?
• Is the Battery Unit switched on?
• Does the Battery Unit have a battery, and is it inserted correctly?

The Light or the Battery Unit

If you’ve got an LED that doesn’t light when it’s plugged into the wall or base it attaches to, the first thing to determine is if the fault is in the Light or the Battery Unit. If you have extras of both pieces that you know work, the easiest thing to do is to try both the suspect pieces with your known good pieces. Plug the suspect Light into a base with a good Battery Unit. And try the suspect base/wall with a known good Light. Whichever one doesn’t work is the source of the problem.

Which way is your Light plugged in?

This mostly applies to the two-prong Lights which plug into a wall socket (since our floor sockets can only be plugged in one way). If you didn’t know, LED stands for Light Emitting Diode- and a diode is an electrical component that only allows current to flow in one direction. For a wall LED, this means it won’t work if it’s plugged in upside down. While torches and lanterns generally have an obvious “up” direction, other pieces can be a bit more ambiguous. These pieces include: LED Glowing Wall Mushroom (both blue and orange), LED Eldritch Wall Ward, LED Rune Stone, LED Wall Orb, and the LED Wall Crystal. For reference, each of these links go to the piece in our Set/Piece Catalogue which shows each LED in the correct orientation. So, if your “bad” Light is one of these pieces, try flipping it around and see if it works that way.

Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

References to “The IT Crowd” aside, you might have missed that all our Battery Units have a small on/off switch. Don’t feel bad if you missed it, most pieces have the switch inset so the piece can be used next to other pieces without the switch getting in the way. If your Light isn’t working, find the switch and try flipping it the other way.

How’s the battery?

If you haven’t used the piece in a while, or if you left it turned on after the last game, the battery may be dead and need to be changed. Or, if it’s fresh out of a new set, it may simply have a bad battery, or (MUCH more rarely) may not have a battery installed at all. Or, if the battery was the first thing you thought of and you just changed it but it’s still not working, you may want to check that the battery is installed correctly. The battery holders in our pieces are optimized to be as small as possible, this leads them to be a bit tricky to deal with. For ALL these situations, checking the battery is a good idea and we have an article on Changing Dwarven Forge Batteries which covers our most common battery types and holders.

In Closing

Once you’ve found the true cause of your lighting issue, hopefully it’s something you can easily fix at your table so it doesn’t affect your game. If the problem is a Light or Battery Unit that’s broken somehow and needs to be replaced, contact us using the form link at the bottom right of this page, or by emailing CustomerSupport@DwarvenForge.com.

Happy gaming!