there is a light that never goes out

In hindsight, one of the genuine high-water-marks of this blog in terms of excitement and red-hot bleeding-edge consumer affairs relevance was the glorious ten-month period where I tracked in tediously unnecessary detail the regular self-immolation of my kitchen spotlight bulbs before the completion of the transition from last-millennium partially-on-fire bits of literal hot glowing metal to modern-day LED technology which basically, as I understand it anyway, involves nothing more sinister than opening up a tiny wormhole to a dimension of pure evil and chaos to harness some of the intense malevolent energy within in an entirely safe and environmentally neutral way.

The last post on this admittedly fascinating subject was in May 2015, at which point I expected (and said as much at the time) that that would be an end of it, as the full complement of LED bulbs would surely last all the way through to the eventual heat death of the universe, or the date that we eventually move out of our current house, whichever comes first. Not so, though, as it happens, as I discovered a couple of days ago that one of the bulbs has, in a very real sense, expired.

But WHICH ONE was it, I hear you, or possibly just the voices in my head, shout. Well allow me to keep you in delightful suspense for just a moment longer with something slightly tangential but still, as you'll come to realise in the fullness of time, relevant. I acquired a new phone a couple of months ago to replace my old Samsung Galaxy A3 which was getting a bit knackered and had always been slightly flaky in the camera department. The new one is a Samsung Galaxy A40, so pretty similar, though inevitably just a few millimetres larger in every dimension. The one thing that's startlingly different about the new phone is how much better the camera is, and in particular how brilliant the built-in wide-angle lens is. I mention this because you'll recall the slightly confusing multicoloured bulb diagram from the original series of posts, and my doomed attempts to provide a real-world version of it through the medium of lying on the kitchen floor taking photos of the ceiling. Well finally, thanks to this spiffy new camera, I can make that dream a reality. Have a gander at this:

So as you can see the bulb that's bought the farm is number 4, which my research tells me blew twice during the period of the original survey, on or before May 17, 2014 and then again around September 23rd, 2014. So the stint which has just ended lasted around 1875 days, which at the original going rate for LED bulbs of 4 quid a pop works out at just over 0.21 pence per day. Compare that with the rates of up to 25p a day I was pissing away on the here-today-literally-gone-tomorrow old incandescent bulbs and it seems like pretty good value; even more so when you consider (just to get a quick plug for my wife in here) that our current Utility Warehouse package will get any expiring LED bulbs replaced for free.