this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2025
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I think your house might be wired wrong if this is happening... The only thing I can think of is maybe if you've got some smart switch and no neutral, so the wifi in the switch has to power itself by leaking current through the light, which is a pretty unusual setup. I don't see how this could ever happen on a regular dumb switch.
LEDs are so efficient that even microamps can power them. If your LED driver is cheap, it'll run on basically nothing, or charge up enough to start for a fraction of a second.
The microamps come from a hot wire running next to a switched wire behaving as a capacitor when carrying AC voltage, letting microamps leak through. (It's not required that the light is on the hot side of the switch as I said previously, my bad).
This can happen if the switch box is a terminal box with hot and switched wires in the same cable, which is rather common. Probably some other configurations too.