One of the fancy Philips Marathon CFL bulbs I installed in my office in February just went pop. So much for the "seven year life" that Philips claims. The warranty requires that I send the old bulb in, along with the receipt (which I do still have) and the proof of purchase (which of course I recycled back in February).
I guess I could buy another bulb and send it's proof of purchase in with the dead bulb. That way I'd have a spare on hand (which seems necessary since I now have my doubts about their reliability), but sending the dead bulb in to Philips costs nearly as much as a whole new bulb. Frustrating.
I've had similar problems with the Philips Marathon bulbs. The life expectancy is nowhere near what they claim. I get about 2 years on average per bulb. Annoying as hell! But it gets worse... Just wait until you start having a problem with the glass portion of the light (the actual CFL light is inside a glass 'globe' for lack of a better term). They sometimes like to separate from the CFL fixture. The result is a glass grenade that falls from the sky and upon impact shatters into about a million sharp little shards! I thought I was the only one until I did a Google search and found someone having the exact same issue!
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090605165335AAz6328
I've had two of these bulbs grenade on me so far (2nd one tonight which is how I found this blog) and it's not fun...
I will be calling Philips tomorrow and see what they say, but I'm not sure I'll be buying these bulbs anymore...
Posted by: Mike | 2010.03.23 at 09:02 PM