Nope to smart speakers or other such gadgets. Don’t want to buy them, and don’t want them listening to me. Absurd to think that’s the solution to stupid, inconvenient design.
We’ll invest in brighter bulbs when the incandescents are gone.
That’s not tied to “apartment design” as I live in an apartment and every room has a light switch right by the entry that controls either a wall or ceiling fixture or a switched outlet. In fact, I think it’s in the building code most places that such a switch needs to be present.
You mentioned not wanting smart home products, but you can get wireless light switches, so you mount a switch to the wall surface and it connects wirelessly to a control that the lamp is plugged into. Googling, they’re at Home Depot for under twenty bucks.
Last few apartments we had were the same. No ceiling fixtures. The last one had switches that did nothing.
We don’t want to spend money on things for this place; we want out as soon as we can afford a house.
It’s possible that those switches “that did nothing” actually controlled a wall outlet, so if a lamp were plugged into it, you’d have a switched light.
I installed 16 4-foot LED fixtures in my barn. I love them.
And if done correctly, only one of the duplex receptacles will be switched, though it’s easier to switch both.
+1 on apartments having one or more outlets controlled by the wall switch at the door. Some places will have the top half of all the outlets controlled this way, some are just the top half of one outlet, or both sides of one, and it’s a treasure hunt to find which one it is.
On dimmers - there’s more than just getting a dimmer meant for dimming LEDs - you need one that’s rated for dimming the specific brand of LEDs you have as the driver circuits are different from one brand to another.
Oh, I know it’s because of the dimmers. I forgot to mention that I knew that. I read your link, but it was Greek to me, and it’s not worth the expense. We have another issue , so when we can scrape the money together, we’ll get an electrician out.
But thanks for your input!
We tried that. We are very aware of how things work and kind of resent when people assume we’re fools. They just didn’t work. The building was very old and very poorly constructed and maintained. It had roaches, rats, and very little insulation.
Which was kind of inevitable – the average layperson would have a very hard time wrapping their minds around the unit price/lifetime cost differential vs. a common incandescent.
Gotta stand on your side on this one. where I am now I have been trying for a couple of years to find exactly WHAT is it those wall switches turn on or off, and as far as I can tell it’s nothing. Every socket is “live” all the time no matter what. I think that when they rewired the place at some point they changed the way it worked.
I filled up my house with CFL bulbs back between '04 and '06. I bought the cheapest I could find- a few burned out quite quickly. Eventually the place was full of 13 W and 23 W curlies. After the early first losses of about 4 bulbs, all of them survived without incident until about 2016 when LED bulbs got cheap enough to replace them. I bought a bunch of 9 W bulbs from Walmart back then. Then, the Dollar Tree started selling 9 W LED bulbs. Now the house is full of LED bulbs.
The only problem I have had with any of them were with two 100 W equivalent Sylvania bulbs that began to flicker. Lowe’s replaced the first one with a different brand since they didn’t sell Sylvania brand any more. The second one was replaced by the company after I emailed them. They simply sent one new bulb to my house by UPS!
There was one problem with buzzing. I made a 4-bulb fixture for my utility room and used four Walmart bulbs. It buzzed slightly when new, but got louder over time. I replaced the bulbs with Dollar Tree bulbs and all has been fine- no buzzing.
I did feel strange placing two plastic grocery bags full of perfectly good CFL bulbs into the recycling bin at Lowe's.