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There are so many different types of lamps out there that having an understanding of the “lamp families” helps you understand how to troubleshoot them easier. Let’s dive in.

 

Incandescent

Incandescent lamps are probably the most known lamps out on the market. When the average person thinks about a light bulb, they tend to imagine an incandescent filament bulb. Incandescent lamps have been used for decades to illuminate homes, roads, businesses, and much more. They were the most widely used lamp of the 20th century as they led the way in illumination from the origin of the light bulb until now.

Incandescent bulbs use a tungsten metal filament on the inside, that has a certain amount of resistance from one end to the other. When you send current through the lamp this filament gets so hot that it begins to glow. This glowing is what the lamp uses to illuminate a room. Every type of lamp has some sort of inert gas on the inside that helps create a “jacket” around the tungsten filament to minimize oxidization. In incandescent lamps this gas is argon. Some other lamps like high-pressure sodium HID’s use xenon instead.

To find out if an incandescent lamps is good you can normally visually inspect the filament. If it appears broken then most likely the lamp is bad. If you’re unsure, or you have a frosted lamp, you can take your tester out and switch it to “continuity” and test from the metal tip of the bottom side of the lamp, to the metal screw-shell. You should hear a continuous tone from the tester. If there’s no tone, then more than likely the filament is broken and the lamp is bad.

 

Halogen

Halogen’s are a slightly different “family” of lamps than incandescent but they operate very similarly so often times they’re still considered incandescent light sources. A halogen lamp still has a tungsten filament inside of them, but they normally put this filament inside of an inner quartz tube deep inside the lamp. The

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