Motion Sensing Light Fixture

Our laun­dry room is in the garage and every time you go in or out dur­ing the night time you have to reach up and away to pull down on a chain to get the light on. After almost 20 years, my patience has worn thin and felt it was time to get a light that would turn on by itself.

We went to Lowe’s over the week­end and searched and searched and they had all man­ner of “on at dusk, off at dawn” devices and plenty of out­door spot­light motion sens­ing lights, but no indoor types. I was just look­ing for some­thing I know I’ve seen some­where, one side screws into a socket and the bulb screws into the other side, but no dice.

When I was com­plain­ing about my inabil­ity to find this motion sens­ing light socket thingie to my cubi­cal neigh­bor Jim on Mon­day he said he was in Home Depot on Sun­day and had seen just what I was describ­ing. On Tues­day Donna and I made the short trip to HD and looked all up and down their light­ing section…twice…and couldn’t find anything.

Begin­ning to doubt the exis­tence of such a fix­ture, when we got home I searched the inter­web and found sev­eral places that sold them for around twenty bucks. I saved a link to place and con­tem­plated whether or not I wanted to pay $7 to ship it.

This morn­ing my cube neigh­bor said he was in Home Depot again yes­ter­day buy­ing some rab­bit fenc­ing to keep the hun­gry from his gar­den, saw the motion sen­sor fix­ture again and thought of me. I told him I had searched high and low and couldn’t find it. He offered to buy one for me, but I said if it was in the store, I’d find it myself. He told me it was not where I first looked, but over by the junc­tion boxes and light switches.

Tonight Donna and I made a return trip to get one of these elu­sive objects. We looked up and down the aisle Jim described and didn’t see any­thing. We expanded our search para­me­ters buy going slowly up and down the aisles on either side…twice…and still so no such thing.

I broke down and asked. The cus­tomer ser­vice rep behind the counter said they were at the end of aisle 4 on the right. Shazam! There they were.

First thing I did when we got home was unscrew the bulb, screw it into the motion sen­sor base and screw the whole thing into the wall socket. Pulled the chain to turn on the elec­tric­ity, waved my hand wildly in front of the sen­sor and was rewarded by noth­ing. Crap. Unscrewed the bulb from the base, the base from the wall and put the bulb back in and it lit up pretty as could be.

All that effort and the thing doesn’t work. Now, it means a return trip to the store. Should I chance it on another cheap unit or just get my money back and just keep yank­ing the chain? I tried it a sec­ond time with lit­tle hope of any change and for what­ever rea­son, it worked.