Lighting fixtures: The downside of bargains

There are a lot of sales and clearance items out there and I try to take advantage of all of them.  Some of them are coming around to bite me now so I thought I should share my experience.

When choosing lighting for our stairwell I wanted to use florescent lighting.  I found these really great lights on sale at Lowe’s for $24 and the bulbs were included.  They were perfect and gave us the right amount of lighting and since they were florescent we could leave them on for safety on the stairs.  The bulbs have recently burned out, they lasted two years of being on all the time so that is the good news.  The bad news is that Lowe’s does not carry that size of bulb even though they still sell the light.   I found the bulbs at Grainger for $18 and $16!  Each light takes two bulbs and there are two fixtures.  So, $68 to replace bulbs in fixtures I only paid $48 for.   Not a good bargain after all.  I ended up buying some cheap $9 fixtures that hold a compact florescent bulb that I got for 19 cents!

Next up are the motion sensor security lighting for outside our house.   I found them on sale at Home Depot  for $25 from $30.  We needed 6 of them and they each had two lights and again, came with bulbs,  tiny halogen ones that ended up being $9 each to replace-so $108 to replace bulbs in fixtures that cost me $150.  They were not lasting very long and the bulbs are so fragile, we broke two just trying to replace them.    I ended up buying new fixtures for $20 each that use regular flood lights.  So far the bulbs have out lasted the halogen bulbs by months!

So, the moral of this story is if you are buying light fixtures find out how much the bulbs and covers are and if they are easy to come by before you buy them so you won’t be burned later by expensive replacements.