Dave Platt wrote:

In article ,
Silver Surfer wrote:

Oops. I should have revealed my ulterior motive. My daughter's
mother-in-law has an outside light fixture that eats incandescent bulbs for
some reason. I measured the voltage and found that it was 123 volts. No
other fixtures in the house eat bulbs like this one does. My wild guess is
that the house wiring (relatively new abode) may be miswired or defective in
some strange way. Would rather not spend a lot of time tracing it out while
possibly damaging the wallboard and such.

You may have a significant-to-serious safety issue there... either a
misconfigured transformer at the street (sending too high a voltage to
the house) or an "open neutral" somewhere. I'd recommend checking
other outlets for voltage... if the voltages are high, or (especially)
if they go *up* if you turn on heavy loads elsewhere in the hours, get
a competent electrician and/or the power company on the issue, stat.

An open/loose neutral can lead to serious voltage fluctuations which
can burn out or damage appliance motors, or even raise the risk of an
electrical fire. My utility (PG&E) apparently considers any report of
high/low voltage in the house to be a situation requiring an urgent
response.

If you really do want to just deal with the light-bulb-burnout issue,
go to a well-stocked bulb supplier (rather than a local hardware
store) and ask for a "130-volt bulb". These are specifically designed
to run on a slightly-higher-than-usual voltage, and on normal line
voltage they run a bit dim and cool and with a greatly extended
lifetime. They're often used in outdoor and remotely-located
fixtures, where bulb replacement is difficult or expensive to perform.


I've seen a lot of 130 Volt bulbs at some of the dollar stores, too.


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