Dimmer switches suck.

for the most part are actually a waste of time and money. In the past couple of months I have had to replace two of the three I have in the house. 

Some day in the foreseeable I will replace the one in the front hall with a basic toggle switch because that, too is a joke. Who needs 'mood lighting' in a hallway?

There is also one in the bathroom which sounds like it makes no sense at all because I have a hard time believing that one goes into the bathroom to take a nice, candlelit romantic dump. 

Still, the bathroom dimmer is the only dimmer switch I use as it is in the shower. The light I installed there is too bright. The dimmer tones it down. It's a case of set it and forget it.

In reality as far as day to day life goes, when I wake up in the middle of the night to pee the night light provides enough light to keep me on target and everything in the pot.

I don't need operating room light to take a shower and in the morning when it is still dark it's a little heavy in the glare department. 

Incidentally (Murphy being an optimist and all) one of the two dimmer switches I have had to replace over the years is the newest one I installed in the bathroom after the fire a couple of years ago. It was about two years old when it stopped working which makes me wonder. The switch I replaced in the hallway was over 20 years old when it died.

When I moved in back around 1992 I started replacing plugs and switches for cosmetic reasons. I believe ALL of the switches and plugs were OEM, installed when the house was built in 1949.

None of then showed any signs of upcoming failure and I do believe they would still be functional to this day, 76 years later.

BUT we have to keep up with the times and time marches on and to make the place look 'modern' or 'new and improved' they got replaced. 

Truthfully, the plugs and simple switches I installed have lasted about 30+ years in some instances. A guess says the newest switches are 25 years old with the exception of any add-on circuits I have installed over the years.

As I remodeled I did replace any old wiring I could as the old stuff tends to get brittle.

Still, what annoys me was having to replace a dimmer switch that died in about 2 years. 

To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY