And Then There Was Light

This post has nothing to do with music. I searched in vain all over the internet for a possible answer to our (former) kitchen light problem. The kitchen light is still the same, but the problem has been solved. Hopefully this post will save a lot of frustration for people searching for answers to what should be a simple problem.

For more years that I would like to remember we would flip the switch to turn on the fluorescent light fixture in our kitchen and hope that it would light up on the first try. After another (undisclosed) number of years, success on the first try happened only once in a great while, but touching the fixture after flipping the switch would usually help the light to start (for me it meant flipping the switch, and then jumping onto a chair so that I could reach the fixture). Eventually we discovered that turning on the laundry room light first raised the odds a bit. Then it seemed that nothing worked anymore.

Michael had the bright idea of putting a night light in our downstairs bathroom (which also has a pesky fluorescent fixture), so that we wouldn't have to try to turn on the stubborn light every time we go in there. Surprisingly, the night light plugged into the mirror raised the odds of the lights around the mirror turning on. We thought that the other night light (they came in a package of two), if it were to be plugged into a socket in the kitchen, might work the same magic.

It didn't do anything. We tried two sockets in the laundry room (one didn't fit in the space, and the other did nothing), and then we tried a third socket. This one happens to be located on the reverse side of the kitchen wall that holds the light switch that is wired to our kitchen light. It is also located along the path from the fuse box to the kitchen switch.

We plugged the little fluorescent night light in the socket, and now the light goes on in the kitchen every single time.