In search of a light bulb
My mums light bulb in a bathroom mirror blew the other day so I have been searching for a replacement. As you can see in the photo it's a strange 2-pin thing about 30mm long including the pins and with no markings, so I couldn't even search for part number MV127-NPG. I decided to look through online electrical distributors but not knowing what the lightbulb/lamp was called was a problem. I briefly tried Google Images, but after 20 pages of light bulbs (mostly incandescent and energy saving) I reverted back to electrical distributors - although I'm sure it was there amongst the 4,100,000 images! I was almost reaching my limit of illumination devices when I reached the Shangri-La of online light bulbs, lamps and tubes. BLT Direct has not only a terrific BulbFinder but has pictures. (screen shot below).
The BulbFinder has 13 parameters (eg. shape, wattage, voltage) with drop down lists for each. So from cap/base type I could select 2 pin (or in fact 2 prongs) and then restrict the wattage to 20W and hey presto a picture of the type of bulb I wanted was in the search result of 11. The other option is to select a group of items (eg. control gear, halogen lamps, compact fluorescent) and then refine the search on the subgroup pictures. For me, one click on halogen lamps and I knew it was a G4 halogen capsule!
My only criticism of the BulbFinder is that there is no way of filtering the results based on a range. For instance, filtering on the length of bulb means selecting one from all the possibilities (about 400) and they are sorted alphabetically (eg. 209mm, 20mm, 20 Inch, 210mm and so on).
If only they sold fridges!
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