A little while ago our 14 year old garage door opener broke and we had the choice of retrofitting it with modern safety gear (required by code before they could even try to fix it) and then a "moderately simple fix" or replacing it with a new opener that came with all the safety gear, and would work, and would be significantly quieter, and would cost less all said and done than just the retrofit parts for the old unit. Needless to say, we picked the new one.
When they put the new opener in, we just moved the light bulb from the old one. it had been in there for a year or two and was still fine. 2 weeks later it flashed and died when opening the door one day. It was an old bulb, so I thought nothing of it and replaced it later that day with another 40w incandescent bulb. That bulb lasted 2 months at the most before it did the same thing… flash and die when turning on (switch on, opener wasn't activated, so no vibrations at all). Another new bulb, this time a 60w "fan light" supposedly vibration resistant long life bulbs intended for ceiling fans and similar environments, one of the ones pictured is a garage door opener. That one lasted a bit over 2 weeks, maybe 3 weeks. Assuming it had to be a bad bulb, I swapped in another from the package… same thing in about a month. So I took one out of our ceiling fan that has been in there for months running just fine. That one flashed and died yesterday, after about a month.
It's a Raynor Corporal 1/2 hp residential opener which says it's rated for 100w max bulb, I've been putting 40 or 60w bulbs in, that seems fine. The unit doesn't have a lot of vibraion, in fact it's far less than our old opener (a 1/3 hp Raynor as well). Anyone have any other ideas what's killing light bulbs in here?
Best Answer
Vibration is still a good guess. Try a "rough service" bulb, usually sold for the work lights that you hang under the hood of your car.
You can also try a 130V bulb; cheaper bulbs are rated at 120V, and so don't tolerate line voltage fluctuations as much.
Another option is an LED bulb. A 40W-equivalent is in the $10 range, and they are supposed to be very vibration resistant.