Malcolm H wrote:

Now, a few weeks later, the low energy bulb has failed and flickers
constantly even on max brightness setting.

My question is this: Could I have damaged the bulb by fiddling with the
dimmer or is it a random premature failure?

Chances are just running it from a dimmer could have shagged it. Dimmers
will often not provide a true sinusoidal output, even at maximum
brightness - there will often be some clipping of the waveform near
crossover. This can result in the output of a fair amount of harmonic
noise, that could end up dumping extra heat from the filter components
in the CFL circuitry.

--
Cheers,

John.

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