I was sitting at my desk in my home office and I wanted to turn on the room light, but I couldn't reach – I was off from the switch by about 3 inches. Being too lazy to get out of my chair, I picked up my external battery pack (exactly the same one as shown below) which was on my desk, clipped a binder clip onto it and reached for the switch.
The moment I hit the switch on, the lightbulb flashed on and burnt out.
I thought "ok that was weird, I guess it was going to burn out anyway"
I got a new lightbulb, put it in and flipped on the lightswitch normally. The light went on but burned out after three seconds.
I thought it could be a coincidence (i.e. defective bulb) so I tried it again.
Same thing happened. Now I'm convinced that me turning on the light with my battery/binder clip contraption really screwed up the light.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to what may have happened and how I might be able to fix it?
Note: All lightbulbs in this story are incandescent 60 watt, 120 volts.
Best Answer
One likely reason is that the light bulbs came from a defective batch. You could try moving a known working bulb from a different location to the suspicious location to verify.
Another reason is that there could be an over-voltage. If possible, use a volt meter to measure the voltage. The voltage should be somewhere between 105 and 125 V (in the united states). If it's out of this range, then there is an equipment fault somewhere. Some reasons would include bad wiring (open neutral) or faulty transformers. It's likely that an electrician would need to be hired (or perhaps power company involvement) to repair the electrical system in this case.