Good old fashioned incandescent light bulbs

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 11 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

The main light bulb blew in our living room earlier this week. Nothing unusual there – it happens. Except have you tried to buy a dimmable, bayonet fitted, pearl finish, low energy, 100W equivalent bulb? If anyone has found one, I’d be interested to know more because, for the life of me, I can’t find a modern replacement.

Luckily, our local independent hardware store (no relation) still stock “old skool” lightbulbs, so we’ve stocked up.  I like to be more energy efficient where it makes sense but the major retailers who have stopped stocking these bulbs have done so because they were lobbied by government the bulbs are inefficient – except all that heat they give off is not going to waste… it just means the central heating doesn’t need to work so hard, surely?

Of course, I’d like to save money, just like the next man, but have you tried to navigate the maze of light bulbs in the average DIY store recently?

Unfortunately, it looks as though the dimmer switch has failed too as the new bulbs won’t fully illuminate in the living room (but are fine elsewhere)… that’ll be a job for me this weekend then…

5 thoughts on “Good old fashioned incandescent light bulbs”

  3. From the looks of things, Phillips are bucking the trend and are now creating LED based lights – as to whether that’ll last longer or not than whatever new thing you buy, I don’t know.

    I just liked the first 1/3rd of the documentary where the bulbs of the time lasted for 2500 hours, and were rigorously cut down to 1000 hours with massive fines against those manufacturers who overdelivered… and then when the Communist Germans brought their bulbs (which burned for 2500+ hours) to a consumer show, they were laughed out of the halls…

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