Third Time's a Charm

The light fixtures in our basement are just exposed bulbs that screw directly into the ceiling junction box.

This has worked just fine for years. Until a few weeks ago when D, swinging his bike up over his shoulder to take outside, whacked the bulb and it shattered. Right on top of his head. It was a CFL bulb. Filled with mercury powder. So yeah, not so great. After dust-mopping, vacuuming, showering, and checking for symptoms of mercury poisoning, he decided to take action. After hunting around Home Depot for a while, no thanks to some very unhelpful employees, I found these:

Light bulb cages! And for only about $3. They're a flexible plastic so I think in theory it would still be possible to hit the cage hard enough to make contact with the bulb. But it would definitely take more force. Time for an easy install! Or so we thought...

First try - tighten the screws around the little lip in the socket. It doesn't seem particularly secure and the clasp won't shut, forcing us to resort to twist ties to hold the cage together. But it seems to do the trick ok.

Then we noticed some extra pieces in the bag. And the instructions. We decided to actually read them and realized that installing these cages right would take a little extra effort. Little legs were supposed to screw directly into the fixtures, making the cage much more secure. "That makes sense," we reasoned, and started over - loosening and taking the cages down, unscrewing the fixture screws, and getting it all back in place. See the little legs at the top of the cage?

One problem - now the lights didn't turn on at all. Apparently those screws were grounding the fixture and now because of those little plastic legs, they didn't go in all the way or something. Not much good protecting the lightbulb if we can't turn it on anyway.

So it was back to the first system, twist ties and all. In the end it didn't take long except for having to put everything together three times (and, actually, factor in the day and a half in which we temporarily gave up out of frustration). But now it's assembled AND the light turns on, so that's progress I guess.

So much for reading the instructions!