Lights flicker and things shut off randomly :(

About the spiral light bulbs, be very careful of them, as we had 2, and they BOTH got dimmer and dimmer over a day or so. They began to glow with a dark orange, and I smelled something hot.
I turned one off, and went to unscrew it and found it was extremely hot! I took it out with a pot holder and saw that it had some cooked looking places on the base.
Then later on, another one failed and got hot. I threw them all away, even the unused ones.

2 neighbors had this happen, and one caught on fire, the other one got so hot that it scorched their lampshade.
So with my experience with these things, is not to ever leave them on if you are not in the same room with them. Or just get rid of them. And stock up on regular bulbs, we have a big box of them in our cellar.

When the lights flicker, do they ever appear to get brighter, or is it only dimmer? This is somewhat critical, as if they get brighter, this could be very costly and requires quick fix. Brighter implies a flakey neutral which could apply much higher voltage to things. Some can handle it, some will be damaged. The observation about the dryer is interesting, but may or may not be relevant. Electric dryers are almost all 240vac devices, and when on, they connect between the two power legs. If there's a flakey neutral, this connection could make what were normally 120vac circuits into 240vac circuits under some circumstances.

jadnashua said:

When the lights flicker, do they ever appear to get brighter, or is it only dimmer? This is somewhat critical, as if they get brighter, this could be very costly and requires quick fix. Brighter implies a flakey neutral which could apply much higher voltage to things. Some can handle it, some will be damaged. The observation about the dryer is interesting, but may or may not be relevant. Electric dryers are almost all 240vac devices, and when on, they connect between the two power legs. If there's a flakey neutral, this connection could make what were normally 120vac circuits into 240vac circuits under some circumstances.

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The lights flicker/ go dim haven't seen any of them get brighter ...
I put a load of clothes in the Wash machine not dryer when the lights flickered.
I don't know if that was coincidental or not because it doesn't do all the time ?

WM are 120vac devices, but an electric dryer is almost certainly 240vac, which is using both legs from the transformer. Dimmer and not brighter brings us back to either a poor connection or a defective device. That poor connection could be anywhere from the power panel to the light fixture.

i'm wondering if he is seeing the lights dim when a load is placed on them. eg, if outlets are hooked in with the lighting, you may see a 'surge' sometimes, like from a vacuum or washing machine turning on.

Yep , I've checked a few , need to keep checking along the circuit to see if I can find the bad connection /or defective device...

I've had the lights on pretty much most of the day and they have not dimmed /flickered once !

Maybe wasting my time doing this, but I know on working on electrical problems with cars in the past you did a wiggle test (GM actually has a warranty code just for that) I've gone around tapping on wall sockets/switches etc and cannot get the lights to flicker/dim...

Chad Schloss said:

i'm wondering if he is seeing the lights dim when a load is placed on them. eg, if outlets are hooked in with the lighting, you may see a 'surge' sometimes, like from a vacuum or washing machine turning on.

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With nothing working that is plugged in IE : wash machine , . The lights still went dim and actually went out for a second then came back on. The lights going completely out only did that Sat night , they haven't gone completely out since just dimmed/flickered .
When the front porch light flickered/dimmed low then went out , I tried the back door light off the dining room and it came on then went out and came back on.

quote; Get an electrician to pull your meter and inspect the clips the meter goes into......

Do that here, and you could be given a $10,000.00 fine for tampering with the meter seals. If it were an open neutral, things would burn out rather than flicker.

capecod12 said:

About the spiral light bulbs, be very careful of them, as we had 2, and they BOTH got dimmer and dimmer over a day or so. They began to glow with a dark orange, and I smelled something hot.
I turned one off, and went to unscrew it and found it was extremely hot! I took it out with a pot holder and saw that it had some cooked looking places on the base.
Then later on, another one failed and got hot. I threw them all away, even the unused ones.

2 neighbors had this happen, and one caught on fire, the other one got so hot that it scorched their lampshade.
So with my experience with these things, is not to ever leave them on if you are not in the same room with them. Or just get rid of them. And stock up on regular bulbs, we have a big box of them in our cellar.

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More FUD. Brand name, and model number? Should be fairly easy to track down complaints on specific bulbs with such a problem. Here's a snopes link: http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/household/cflbulb.asp The ballasts can burn out with the sweet acrid burnt wiring smell something I've seen once in the past 7 years or so, but that's a far sight from actually catching fire.

Wanna catch something on fire or scorch a lampshade? Place an incandescent up against it. Wouldn't want that fire hazard in my house. Time to break out the candles...oh...wait a minute, those are the waxy things with open flames that our fire marshall will talk your ear off about wanting to ban sale and posession in the city limits.

As an experiment: run an incandescent for 20 minutes, then try to unscrew it with your bare hand. I'm betting you will discover that it is "extremely hot!" Hmmm...that must be why we've used incandescents as heaters in well houses and the like.

Chad Schloss said:

i'm wondering if he is seeing the lights dim when a load is placed on them. eg, if outlets are hooked in with the lighting, you may see a 'surge' sometimes, like from a vacuum or washing machine turning on.

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Lived in a house that had issues like that. When the washing machine was agitating the lights dimmed in time. I could read about a 10+ volt drop at the outlets on different circuits when this was happening. It also coincided with loads in the neighborhood at times, and our neighboors commented on the same thing happening in the evening. My UPS would cycle in and out periodically when the swings were wide enough. I wasn't sure if it was a shared transformer or the local grid behind some of the problems.

At least that house had a few circuits...I lived in one a few years later that had only two fuses for lighting and outlets, one for one end, one for the other. It did have dedicated fuses for the major appliances. Nobody had labeled most of them in the ~50 years they had been there of course. As with every other home I've lived in that job fell to me. It's one of the first things I do when I move in. Comes in handy too, like when the oven element burned out during the first meal cooked in a home, and then began melting down spectacularly without burning out the screw type fuse. That oven never was right...shoulda let the thing burn long enough to replace the whole piece of crap.

I dont have the picture that one neighbour sent any more, it had a big black spot on the base of the bulb casing and it actually was sparking and had a tiny flame. Not in the picture, as he took it afterwards + emailed it to me.

The other neighbour had not put the spiral in the lamp so that it was touching the shade, but the thing got so hot that it scorched the shade. If its like my shades, the bulb would be about an inch or 2 clearance.

And my hot bulb was way way hotter than an incandescent one. It was very stinky too, like burnt toast, sort of. Not the bulb part itself, but the base, it ended up being all discolored.

Candles have caused more house fires than anything else, all combined. Thats why if we use a Christmas or scented candle, its never on if we arent in the same room, and they are always in a dish.

Abouthadit said:

The lights flicker/ go dim haven't seen any of them get brighter ...
I put a load of clothes in the Wash machine not dryer when the lights flickered.
I don't know if that was coincidental or not because it doesn't do all the time ?

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The gross current-to-voltage phase differences in washer/dryer motors causing dimming/flickering is usually a symptom of an overloaded or loose neutral connection somewhere in the house, or a bad connection between your neutral and ground (usually a copper stake driven into the earth near the power drop or meter, in my neighborhood, or on the neutral tie-in on the power company's side before the meter. If the utility only tested the voltages at no-load, they didn't fully test the neutral connection. A bad crimp on the drop that's corroding wouldn't necessarily be bad enough to cause things to burn out right away and still test OK at modest current, but still cause flickering and voltage excursions, particularly under motor or magnetic ballast loads- anything with a crappy power-factor.

Illegitimate loop connections between neutrals inside the house can also create oddball symptoms like that.

capecod12: You must have the crummiest-quality power in MA, if it's burning up twisty-bulb ballasts like popcorn! 99.99% of the users of said devices go years between failures. It's not the bulbs!

Not the bulbs?
No problem with anything else, is our power that bad?
Ive got classmates in Canada and other places in USA who complain about these bulbs too.

I bought 2 and they both failed, so I wont buy any more.
Im not crazy about stuff built in China,,,,,,

capecod12 said:

Not the bulbs?
No problem with anything else, is our power that bad?
Ive got classmates in Canada and other places in USA who complain about these bulbs too.

I bought 2 and they both failed, so I wont buy any more.
Im not crazy about stuff built in China,,,,,,

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Don't look now, but most all manufactured goods have some component manufacture or assembly & test in China. You can't even take an aspirin to get over your silly light-bulb headache without injesting Chinese content- get over it! Trade is international, and everybody is buying everyone else's stuff, and there's good/bad/so-so stuff in any market. CFLs are currently made in China because that's where the high-labor content mid-skill tube-bending process can be done for cheap, but as China gets richer it'll probably move to Vietnam, Bangladesh, or developing parts of Africa, so you won't have to buy them from China.

Bottom of the line CFLs have high "infant mortality" rates, but nothing like what you're describing. Motors are very tolerant of crummy power quality, as are most switching power supplies in consumer electronics, but it's hard to put sufficient filtering and protection into a ballast that needs to fit in an Edison base. Self-ballasted CFLs are less tolerant of switching spikes, but most can handle 10% over/under voltage without frying. If you're really are blowing with less than a hundred hours on them, it's not the CFL. I have case-histories on dozens (maybe hundreds?) of CFLs that have made it through years of service and thousands of on/off cycles without failing.

ENOUGH, am not angry or upset, nor do I appreciate anger, Im just stating the facts that I observed.
Bye

Called an have an electrician coming out Fri morning.

Ok most of the day had lights on in kitchen/dining room and nothing , through in a load of clothes in to wash and within a minute both kitchen / dining room lights flickered and completely went out. The washer machine actually shut off. Started the washer again and within minutes it shut off. Lights flickered went out.
Went out to panel shut breaker off , basically all over head lights went out through out the house. wall plugs still hot , turned another breaker off and certain wall sockets went out. Flipped another breaker and both the refrig and socket to washer went out.
So since the lights and washer are on two different breakers what gives ?

Right now both lights in kitchen / dining are on and not a bip/flicker/dim nothing.??

Have no idea why all of a sudden wash a load of clothes and the lights on another breaker/circuit goes crazy ?

Also is it normal to have the refrigerator and wash machine on the same breaker ?

Dana said:

capecod12: You must have the crummiest-quality power in MA, if it's burning up twisty-bulb ballasts like popcorn! 99.99% of the users of said devices go years between failures. It's not the bulbs!

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That's what I'm thinking as well. More likely it is an issue with the local grid if it is really frying things so readily.

Also when someone mentions an email with a pic of a bulb in it that came from a neighbor, I think of the many forwarded emails of the same ilk that I've gotten from primarily conservative friends/relatives who don't bother to check the source. Lots of intentional misrepresentations going on out there, and they swallow it right up. (My favorite was roaches in the tongue from licking envelopes.) I tell them to check Snopes first...but then I get emails saying how someone higher in the chain checked snopes and it's not a hoax. Unfortunately, checking myself by copying text into Google confirms they are hoaxes.

If you read the frig's manual, it probably says it should be on a dedicated circuit, same for the WM. So, no, they should not be.

Abouthadit said:

Its only on a certain circuit which I replaced lights on.

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My first instinct is that you wired something incorrectly when you worked on those light switches. Did you read the manual for the dimmers and ensure that you connected them correctly? (For electronic dimmers, it makes a difference which leads are connected to hot and neutral.) I would check that first.

If that checks out, then next inspect all your wirenut connections to make sure they are good. Did you use a good quality wirenut? The tan-colored nuts with small, angled wings made by Ideal are much better than the standard yellow nuts with the larger, straight wings. If you have a loose connection or a poorly-made connection, the physical vibration from the washing machine running could cause flickering.

If all that checks out, then I would pull all the dimmers and replace them with standard on/off switches and see if you can duplicate the problem. If so, then you have a problem with your power or your wiring. If not, then the problem is in a dimmer (or the way the dimmer was wired).

If no flickering experienced with standard switches, then add the dimmers back in one at a time, waiting several days between each installation. Once the flickering starts, then you've discovered your bad dimmer.

I've seen noisy dimmers interacting with one another when there's an illegitimate loop tying two branch neutrals together too. (Or in 3-ways with a dimmer on both ends designed for single-switched circuits.)