Strip Lights

These things?

Err, thanks for that Sue. I must have had the blinkers on when I was thumbing through the catalogue.

ISTR that they were under "Fluorescent Lights" on their website. Not the obvious place to look.

I wrote a letter of complaint after they screwed up four consecutive orders that I placed - wrong goods, wrong quantities, late arrival, broken items. I had rather hoped for a money-off voucher or at least an apology but all I got was taken off their mailing list..So they don't send me catalogues any more (but I do still place orders and get goods from them..)

These are horribly inefficient (much worse than a normal light bulb), and the bulbs are very vibration/shock sensitive, and they are only rated for a short life anyway.

To make a filament that long which works at mains voltage, these have to be single coil filaments, rather than the more normal double coil filament. Due the the effective increase in surface area, the bulbs have to be vacuum rather than gas filled, which would conduct too much heat from the filament. In the absence of any gas fill, the bulbs have to be underrun to get any sort of life out of them, which makes them horribly inefficient, around

I would suggest looking at a solution using T4 (0.5" diameter) fluorscent tubes. There are a number of products on the market now.

Many thanks for the advice Andrew, all noted.

We have had one of these light fittings on our wardrobe unit above the mirror since we got it back in 1979. It has been in use every day, we've moved twice, changed rooms etc and it is still working on the same bulb. They saying, they don't make them like they used to springs to mind :-)

I made a 24 hour 7 segment digital clock out of them, many years ago. ISTR that a lamp would go every 4 or 5 months - but, of course, they weren't all on, all the time and they ran dimmed at night.

I'll leave it to some-one with their brain functioning to work out how that correlates with the 750 hours that Andrew mentioned - mine has switched to weekend mode..

But they weren't subject to mechanical shock or vibration..