... but the fluorescent tubes in the lights under my kitchen cabinets keep going. Every replacement tube I buy (and I've bought about a dozen in 4 years for a set of 5 lights) say they'll last 15 years or 15,000 hours and previous experience with these lights (traditional 20-something mm diameter tubes with a separate starter) leads me to expect them to fail far less frequently than they do. They don't seem to get more than slightly warm, and the mains is OK-ish if not as stable as when I lived in town. I've been replacing the starter with each tube that goes.

Any ideas?

Ha!

I'll anwser your question when I get back from Homebase, I'm having problems with my mixing desk.

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'You know it's a bad role when Nic Cage passes on it.'

Mixing desk - easy. I know where to hit that when it goes wrong. These bloody lights are a total mystery to me.

Have they always been like this from day 1?

If so, I'm wondering if the wrong ballast (choke) was fitted. The ballast for long tubes has a lower impedance than one for short tubes and therefore will over-run them without any obvious indication that there's a problem.

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It wasn't me!
(Well, actually, it probably was)

Well I just looked at the Wikipedia article on fluorescent lights to try and get the terminology clear in my head. It states that frequent switching dramatically shortens tube life - "to less even than a cheap incandescent lamp". Since my 4 year old son has gone through a phase of flipping the switches whenever he can this may well be the problem. I think he's pretty much stopped doing it, so I'll monitor the situation and see where we go.

Just for info, there are 4 18" x 15 watt tubes and one 36" x 30 watt tube. I've always replace them along with the starters, which are normally rated for 4-65 watt tubes. Any other problems with the circuitry will depend on the units themselves, and if they're as cheap and nasty as the rest of the kitchen, they may well need replacing, too. Trouble is, we 're saving up to knock the whole kitchen down and rebuild it bigger and better, so I don't want to buy new units if I can avoid it.

That's completely exhausted my insight into this topic now ... thanks for the suggestion.