They sell "ceiling fan bulbs" which are basically rough service bulbs without the thicker glass. Appliance bulbs are also good. Standard duty bulbs often have a VERY short life in a fan installation due to vibration. Particularly at low or medium speed on fans that change the number of poles to change the speed.
Incandescent bulbs get more sensitive to shock and vibration as they age because the filament gets brittle. Halogen bulb filaments are the worst as they're thin to start with and the coils are closer together than filament coils in standard bulbs.
Handle incandescent bulbs gently once they've burned for a while.
Tomsic
Heat doesn't affect bulb life unless the basing cement on the bulb fails or the glass melts. Shock and vibration or higher than rated voltage kills bulbs prematurely though.
Tomsic
Ten years from now that might even be a good idea.
Buy the ones with no "coil" at all, just a straight filament? Like I said in an earlier post, I've only replaced bulbs in one fixture (and that rarely used). The other five fans in the house still have the original bulbs.
Well, it did in my case, so it must have effected the basing cement. Is that possible? It wasn't the vibration, becasue this phenomenon occurred even when I didn't turn the fan on (at all).
Heat affects the vibration resistance of a fillament. The hotter it is, the more fragile.
Yes, assuming you mean the temperature of the filament. A few degrees of fixture or bulb temperature even around 100 degrees Celsius does nothing to an incandescent filament already operating at 2427 Celsius. In addition, the tungsten filament is self-regulating as its resistance is a function of its temperature.
Even if the fan is off, there may be vibration in the house that gets transmitted through the fan structure to the bulbs. I had a trouble call once where the complaint was that the bulbs in a dining room chandelier were burning out too fast. The bulbs were the flame-shaped candelabra type and had long filaments with very little filament support. I couldn't find any high-voltage problems which was my first thought; but while I was working on the chandelier, there was a thump upstairs and the chandelier shook so hard that the various parts rattled. It was one of the kids in his bedroom jumping off the top of his bunk bed onto the floor. That kind of shock when the lamp is burning will kill any lamp because it welds several of the filament coils together and the rest of the filament gets a higher voltage. It then burns significantly hotter and fails faster.
Tomsic
A 100 watt bulb fillament will ALWAYS be hotter than a 40 watt filament.
That and the filament just plain fails from the vibration. No shorting required. That's why rough service bulbs have thicker filaments - as do some "appliance duty" and "ceiling fan" bulbs (which also sometimes have additional filament supports)
replying to Tomsic, Richard Riley wrote: Just type in 4.5 uf fan capacitor (or the value on the bad one) into ebay. I bought one for $6 with tax and shipping, and another is coming from Hong Kong for $1 PP. Probably two to three weeks. Now I should have a spare.
I hope he got it fixed back in the year that he posted, not waiting until 2016 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
replying to TomR, Jimelectr wrote: Or order from Digi-Key, Mouser, Newark, Allied, etc., the electronics distributors. I just bought one for about a dollar after my ceiling fan quit. Sure enough, the capacitor looked about like yours, burned and melted. It said
4 uF and 300 VAC on it, so I got a similar film type cap. We'll see how it goes.HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.