This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
Tried converting a story from TIFU to greentext because I'm bored at work.
I saved a Gimp Template while working on it: https://files.catbox.moe/ipnjzk.xcf
Me plugging my monitor into my mobo instead of my graphics card for three years. I thought I had just gotten reeeeally unlucky in the silicon lottery.
Last time I did that I just didn't get any output to the monitor, isn't that how it's supposed to work?
Massively depends on the system.
if you get a F series CPU with no igpu then you will likely get no output.
Or getting a high refresh rate monitor and not changing the refresh rate in your os.
I have one of those fans. It only has a remote, no pull chains. I fucking hate that thing as much as I have ever hated anything in my life. It's so shitty. You would think having buttons would make it easier to use than a pull chain but they somehow made it even worse. Both the light and fan use the same Up and Down arrows to change the setting but there's a delay of a second or two between hitting the button and the fan actually changing (if it changes at all). There's also no indicator of which setting you're on currently (which is the only annoying part about pull chains). Also couldn't get it to switch directions for winter even after spending probably an hour on their site and Youtube looking at documentation and trying shit.
anon gets owned by a fan
Pro tip: Modern American fans are required to have a voltage limiter chip to dial down the lights. They fail. Lots. If your fan lights don't work, buzz, hum, whatever, take it down and cut the little fucker out, wire back together with wire nuts.
I've replaced two crappy fans with really nice units I found in the trash. 100 how-to's on YT.
Human Moment™. One of my former professors in Uni, the one I respected the most because she was one of the wisest and most perceptive people I'd met at that point, confided in us that it took her however many years since their introduction to realise that the small light on some wall-mounted light switches was meant as a guidance light if it's pitch black.
I always thought those were just there to incentivize turning it off at the breaker /s
This feels...wrong.
I was gonna say “CFLs just plug into a normal socket, those don’t generally just ‘go bad’”
Worst case scenario just replace the light kit and check your wiring but yeah obviously that wasn't OP's issue
Of course doing that with the fan still together/hanging is much more of a pain than just getting a new one, usually, especially if the fan is old. Most other electricians I know don't bother doing ceiling fan repairs, they'll swap em but any more than that's not worth their time. I'll do whatever but I'll be up front about it.
Especially since you're usually doing it for retired folks who can only afford so much...
The text is about a halogen bulb, though, not a CFL. Those generally use flanged prongs.
I totally misread that.
I'm pretty sure he meant a CFL.
For exactly that reason.
It still wouldn't be dim, it would either work or not. If it's dim, it's either a bad bulb or a setting on the light housing causing less voltage (I think?) to make it to the bulb.
or a setting on the light housing causing less voltage (I think?) to make it to the bulb
Aren't you just describing dimmers, the topic of the post?
Exactly!
I'm saying the likelihood of the socket/housing causing a dim light is vanishingly small, so OP should have caught this 6 years ago if they had even a passing understanding of how lights work.
My immediate asumption without looking it up was either it's not getting the right voltage or enough amperage since electricity is generally passed through to lights, so it would either work or not. So, either the bulb is bad (old lights get dim) or there's a setting somewhere on the fan or switch messing with the voltage or current. My first guess is the bulb, and if two fail, I'd check the fan.
After a quick search, apparently dimmers are fancier than that, and they actually modify the signal instead of adjusting voltage or amperage. But my initial intuition wasn't far off. The power is indeed on or off, and something else was interfering (the dimmer). If the fan didn't have the capability to adjust brightness, there would be no reason to interfere with the signal.
Simple logical deduction based on a passing understanding of electricity and lights would've led to the problem.
The integrated circuits in a lot of lighting fixtures (and you know OP's light is run by integrated circuit because it can be controlled by remote) are basically a black box of complexity where things can go wrong in a non-intuitive way. Some kind of failure to deliver sufficient power to a particular bulb or LED or other element isn't necessarily an indication of anything in particular.
it's less that dimmers are fancier than you thought and more like adjusting voltage or amperage without ridiculous losses is hard and or significantly more expensive than you thought.
Makes sense.
My point is that a little bit of deduction should lead someone to the conclusion that the dim light was an intentional feature going "wrong" or a bad bulb.
Depends on the CFL. I had to replace one in a fixture in my new house a few months after I bought it, and it was some goofy round one with a rectangular attachment point and some clips. Thankfully it was pretty easy to replace and was easily gettable from Dom Depot, but I was definitely surprised by the socket when I went to replace it.
Anon has never heard of lamps, either.
