Light Socket Repair for Dummies

This is a light socket, Tony

One of the greatest failings of eHow.com – besides the obvious fallacy of their allowing "communications" and English Lit grads to write about fluid dynamics or remodeling garages – was allowing those contributors to decide for themselves what anonymous web-searchers meant by the phrases they typed into Google. Worse, the site's "checkers" (the vaunted content editors) rarely, if ever, disagreed with the contributors. Consequently, a lot of dreck made it onto the site. We're talking about stuff like "How to Fix a Broken Light Socket," an Anthony Smith post that now lives at HomeSteady.com.

We included an image, above right, of a light socket. Sometimes they're white ceramic or plastic; sometimes they're metal, typically brass. A socket is a permanent piece of a light fixture or lamp into which a consumable bulb fits by screwing or clamping.
That's not, however, what Smith seemed to think. Even though one of his two references explicitly stated, "Be sure the bulb is screwed into the socket all the way," Anthony chose to ignore the distinction between socket and fixture. As you can tell from visiting any decent hardware store, you can find replacement sockets for lamps if you want to save the expense of replacing the entire works. That is not, however, that Smith said.

No, Anthony started by telling his readers to,

"Remove the cover plate from the light fixture."

That oughta be interesting. Any suggestions on how that works, Tony? No? We didn't think so... After babbling about testing the circuits (65 per cent of the "instructions"), Tony said to,

"Disconnect the broken fixture and dispose of it. Connect the new fixture in the same way as the old one."

Well, that certainly fixes a broken socket! Of course, given that you've replaced the entire fixture, we wondered why Smith's final step was to,

"Replace the fixture cover..."

So let's get this straight: instead of repairing or replacing a defective socket, our "expert" (a contributor to the The College Baseball Newsletter) wanted you to just toss the fixture and replace it, then put the cover from the old fixture on the new one... we think. No wonder Tony's our Dumbass of the Day...

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