How to fix a broken lightbulb

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Sometimes, the cheapest bulb is the kind you never have to spend any money on to replace!

Next time your vanity bulbs burn out over your bathroom mirror, try giving them this fix before tossing out and installing replacements.

Read more: 29 home remodeling projects that offer the best payback

Do this to fix your globe vanity bulbs…

Cards on the table: I am cheap.

My latest adventure in cheapness involves lightbulbs, specifically the old school incandescent kind invented by Thomas Alva Edison.

I’m not an incandescent bulb hoarder. Nor am I opposed to CFLs or LEDs. My home has roughly 75% LEDs, 20% CFLs and 5% incandescents.

But as I said, I am cheap!

I know it’s been said the true cost of a bulb is not the purchase price, but the cost of the energy it burns over time.

While I do agree with that statement, sometimes I think it makes more financial sense to extend the life of a traditional bulb rather than to replace it with the latest, greatest technology.

How to fix a broken lightbulb

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Here’s my rationale: Let’s say you bought that incandescent on sale for 50 cents a bulb. It eats a full 60 watts of electricity. Yet that might only be about $3 a year in energy expenses per bulb depending on your usage.

(Or maybe you really luck out and find a crazy deal like the one over at our Deals site: 72 bulbs for $12, which is roughly 3 cents per bulb!)

A comparable LED, meanwhile, could cost around $6. It will only eat 11 watts to give you the same light as the 60-watt incandescent. But unless you get it on deep discount, you might not make your money back on that bulb for a year or two.

So you could call it delaying the inevitable, but when an incandescent burns out above the bathroom mirror, I’m not exactly leaping to buy a costly LED to replace it. (Do they even make clear glass LEDs for bathrooms?)

And therein is the crux of my argument: There’s an alternative to throwing away incandescents that have burned out. In fact, it’s pretty easy to fix those things and extend their life for anywhere from a few months to a year before they finally give up the ghost for good.

The fix involves reconnecting the two strands of filament inside the bulb. Chances are that filament melted and snapped, causing the light to go out. But if you can get the two dangling strands to touch again, your light will burn anew.

Not sure what I’m talking about? Just watch this video below that I made explaining the process and showing it in action.

This trick works great with my Great Value 25-watt clear globe light bulbs from Walmart.

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How to fix a broken lightbulb

Source: How to fix a broken lightbulb by Clark on Rumble

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