Oil derrick question

Usually running bulbs over their rated voltage will shorten their life. Sounds like your bulbs life is extremely short, which would mean either the voltage is way over, or there is another problem.

Are your bulbs any good?

I picked up a box of GE landscape bulbs on Ebay for use in both our landscape lights, and in our vaccuum cleaner. I suspect they were rejects because they burn out very rapidly. I purchased some other bulbs (same type), and these work fine.

These bulbs are 2-3 years old and when bought from my LHS, they were listed as being new. Might try a newer batch to see if that works and also wire the derrick to a lower voltage on the LW to see if that improves their lifespan.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Do you have a meter to confirm the transformer is putting out 14 volts.... or more? Try using 10 volts and work your way up.

Thanks Don... I'll do both, hopefully I can then quit popping these bulbs so quickly.

So the saga continues with the 363 bulbs.

If dedicating an entire transformer output tuned to some magic voltage just for the derrick is impractical, try some 10 cent diodes between the 14V accessory bus and the derrick. Dale H describes this in some detail below.

Dropping voltage with diodes