DIY Doctor UK DIY Forums

I have had 30 halogens fitted Throughout the house for a number of years but, when a bulb blows it is always the same fitting......... any ideas why this should be happening?

Likely the pins are making a poor connection and the bases are damaged, it is purely because of the problem replacing bulbs all the time that I moved to LED.

We are told LED are energy saving, outside clearly they are, but in the home they only save energy if the heat is not required, and often we want the temperature to raise in the evening so to replace the quartz bulbs means also more control required for central heating so temperature varies through the day.

So with my house, for 230 volt we swapped to LED, and for 12 volt I was lucky my house had proper transformers not electronic ones, so again straight swap, and since swapping I had a couple of 0.58W 12 volt MR16 type fail which were hopeless any way, but non of the 1.8W and above bulbs have failed, did have one 24W tube that replaced a 58W fluorescent fail but not any 230 volt bulbs.

Slowly swapped over 4 years no bulb less than a year old, some getting close to 5 years old. I did have to swap bulbs because not big enough, had 10 bulbs in two living rooms the larger room started as 2 x 100W bulbs and before LED was 10 x 8W CFL, swapped to 2 x 1.8W + 8 x 3W from Lidi, seemed great to start with, then realised hard to read, so moved those bulbs to the smaller room and replaced with 5W bulbs.

As you can work out 1/4 of power used by original 2 x 100W bulbs seems LED needs around that amount of power.

Ditto with ericmark, a very common problem. Next time you change a bulb look at the 2 pins carefully on the bulb & see if one has discoloured. If it has, change the lamp holder before putting a new bulb in. The lamp holders are easily available from eBay or local electrical shop/wholesalers.