Q: How many light bulbs does it take to change a light bulb?A: Five and counting.
In the houses of my youth we had one type of light bulb, incandescent with a bayonet cap (BC). Most rooms would use 100 watt globes, but small rooms or corridors would have 60W or 75W. We would therefore have a collection of spares on hand for the regular replacement of burnt out globes, and all spares would fit all sockets, though possibly being too bright or too dim for a few days until the weekend grocery shopping trip.
The house I moved to recently has different bulbs for every single room! The kitchen has four spotlight GU10 lights. Three are hot unreliable halogens, and one was an empty socket which I filled with a cool modern long-lasting ultra-efficient LED.
The bathroom has an Edison screw (ES) compact fluorescent (CFL). It was an incandescent, but this wasn't bright enough for our needs, so we replaced it with a brighter CFL of the same wattage, the maximum allowed for the light fitting.
The hallway has three small Edison screw (SES) globes. Currently one is an eco-halogen, one is a CFL and the final is empty because the hallway is bright enough.
The living room has a dimmer switch controlling a single light fitting with three SES bulbs in a candle shape. The normal bulb shape will not fit in the light fitting.
Thus we have different bulbs for every single room, which makes keeping spares rather expensive. Which brings me back to my initial DIY fail. How have I managed to take five bulbs to replace one broken one?
Last week on switching on the living room dimmer light one of the bulbs exploded noisily and projected glass fragments over a 2 metre arc. Replacing the dead globe with a CFL produced a light which could not be dimmed. I then belatedly remembered that some CFLs are not amenable to dimming, so I purchased an eco-halogen. Again, it would not dim. I read more about dimmers, and learnt that some have a minimum wattage. Perhaps the eco-halogen, in combination with other bulbs, was below this. So I bought a higher wattage eco-halogen. It still didn't work. I then examined the ratings of all the bulbs in the fitting, during which I accidentally broke the filament of the remaining working incandescent bulb, so I now had to buy two more. I found a shop still selling incandescents (supposedly banned in Europe they are widely available via the "rough service" loophole), but these still produced no dimming.
Apparently dimmer switches are prone to breaking, so now I'm looking at replacing ours. Then I should have dimming. If only that original single bulb had not blown...
Update 30 Jul 2014: A new £10 dimmer switch fixed the problem. It can cope with bulbs with a combined power output of between 60 and 450 watts. The light fitting itself has holders for three bulbs of up to 40 watts each. To be safe I'm going to have to use bulbs of between 30 and 40 watts each, so that if one blows it won't put the dimmer switch in danger of meltdown. There isn't much margin for error in this set up. Ideally I'd have a dimmer switch that could cope with lower wattages so I could use more efficient bulbs, but none were available in the B&Q I visited.