Hi

You can go a long way to drive the life of the bulb up with two
resistors. Put one resistor in series with the bulb to knock down the
applied voltage. The other resistor is put in parallel across the switch
to put just a little current through the filament when it is supposed to
be off. It should just glow faint red. By doing this, the inrush current
is reduced since the filament is already hot. Inrush current is what
kills the bulbs.

Regards





"James Sweet" wrote in
news:8tBqb.132610$Tr4.339531@attbi_s03:


"Bob M." wrote in message
...
Yeah, and the reason you don't SEE many of them any more is that they
keep burning out!

Perhaps the way to keep the vintage stuff original would be to put a
small value resistor in series with the bulbs so they last longer.
They'd be dimmer, but put it on a shelf near the ceiling where it's
darker anyway
and
maybe no one will notice.

Bob M.

Well yeah, I didn't say incandecent was very practical, but it's cool
none the less. Someone else mentioned this unit has a photocell to dim
it when the room is dark, one could probably just put a variable
resistor across or in series with this to adjust the max brightness,
dimming it 20% would extend lamp life considerably, but then if you
get a large quantity of replacement lamps it'd be pretty easy to just
replace them when they burn out, or group relamp the segments that see
the most use.