LED Lightbulbs

A real light bulb fading into history

Ever since the European Union passed one of the silliest and patronising laws banning the manufacture and sale of “normal” lightbulbs, we have struggled with lights in our house. I’m all for energy saving - just ask Cees how I follow him round the house switching off lights and I had energy saving bulbs long, long before they were compulsory, but I had them where I wanted them and where they were “safe”.

It is totally unsafe to have a system of lighting that you have to wait up to 2 minutes (I kid you not for the ones in our living room) before you can enter a space safely and can actually see where you are.

We have been relying on hand-me downs from Cees’ daughter and the one or two precious bulbs we still have left, to use in places where light is actually needed instantly.

Emergency rations

Finally LED lights have come of age and are available and affordable and wow… it is still a joy to walk into our living room and flip the switch and hey presto there was light. But their price is not a rock-bottom, giveaway prices and our old energy saving lights are still working, so we have only slowly started the replacement process.

One of  the recently removed light bulbs

This process was given a big boost last week when a money-off voucher arrived for our local DIY shop, finally we could replace the lights in the kitchen cum dining room.

At that moment we discovered another reason that you shouldn’t use these horrible energy-saving lights – wasps! We found a wasp’s nest in each of the four energy-saving light bulbs and none in the two proper light bulbs. Not only could we have been stung by these angry beasties, but those nests could have caught fire.

All four had the same problem

We are now "real light bulbs-less" in the house, and almost "energy-saving light bulb-less". I’ll keep the real ones for posterity, they might be worth some money in a few years but those ghastly things are going in the bin, it was almost worth voting Brexit to get rid of them – I said almost...