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How many BYOACers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
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saurian333:
I'm on my second house with the same light-flickering, bulb-eating problem.

It's these old houses.  The wiring just plain sucks (as bkenobi basically said).  CFLs do better, but as others have mentioned, it's not a great solution to have that kind of light everywhere in the house if you don't like it.  I haven't found another solution that works; lower wattages don't seem to help much.  Even if they did, my fiancée bitches that it's too dark with anything less than 100W.  (When the store's generic bulbs only went up to 90W, she paid 3 times as much to get the brand name 100W bulbs.)

Sorry I don't have anything else for you.  If you find a solution that doesn't involve CFLs, let me know.  I guess I could make the landlord call an electrician, but not until I'm off the night shift; bad enough the HVAC guy has to wake me up.
evitagen:
Sounds like either a loose neutral in the panel or a breaker going bad.  I'm an electrician at a college and we have a lot of old off-campus housing and this happens commonly.

I'm not too sure how you feel about going into your electrical panel, so get someone else who knows what they are doing.  Tighten down all of the neutrals in the panel(which hopefully is where it would be loose at) and locate the breaker the lights are on and change it... It's probably 15A so it will be really cheap to replace.

I've had to actually go from device to device before trying to locate a loose neutral before I finally found it.

Although it could be anything... If you have an amp-meter you can turn everything on an get an amp reading on that circuit to make sure it's not pulling over 12-13A.

Hope this helps...
drventure:
One thing I've noticed about CFL bulbs lately, if you watch which ones you buy there are some out there that are a much warmer color, and so look very close to incandescent.

The cheap ones at wal-mart will look like high school gym lights but there are better versions.

Thing is, I haven't really noticed these things lasting anywhere near the times people say they do. But, I have a number of them installed bulb down in cans, so it very well maybe the heat killing them.
evitagen:
Yeah I think the next step will be LED lighting... it just costs a lot on the front end right now.
bkenobi:
CFL's don't last as long as they say on the package because people don't use them the way they are tested.  CFL's are designed to be mounted vertically with the circuit on the bottom (bulb pointing up).  If you install them in any other direction they will get too hot without adequate air flow.  If you install them in a closed fixture (like a standard overhead light for instance), there is zero air flow, so they will get hot.  In this environment, you will probably see longer life out of an incandescent than from the "long life CFL".

There's one other thing that was suggested to me about the wiring that you might want to check.  It's possible that the power coming into your house is dirty.  It's possible there is a lot of noise on the line or inconsistent current even.  You can contact your power provider and ask them to check it for you.  My power company said they wouldn't check because they knew it was fine, but I've read (on different forums) that some people have had success in getting this type of problem fixed with a simple phone call.
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