No incandescent bulb? Dim bulb tester workaround!

I have seen the question posed recently of what people will do when they can no longer buy incandescent bulbs to use in their dim bulb testers. While I believe that incandescent bulbs will be available for a long time yet, here is a workaround I thought of:

When I made my dim bulb tester, I simply wired 2 standard outlets in series in a box with a power cord attached. That way whenever I needed to do a dim bulb test, I would just grab a lamp from somewhere, screw a 100 or 150 watt bulb into it and plug it into one of the outlets then plug the item to be tested into the other. What to do if you don't have a lamp with an incandescent bulb in it? Well most of us who work on electronics probably have a Weller soldering gun. Mine has a 2 position trigger for 100 and 140 watts. It also has a light on the front that would glow bright or dim just like a dim bulb tester would. An interesting feature of this would be that you could leave the item under test powered on and use the trigger of the soldering gun to apply the current at either the 100 or 140 watt setting.

It's not a perfect solution because most soldering guns have a duty cycle but would be fine for most situations.

For those really high power units, a toaster will do just fine for a current limiter. Might be a bit higher wattage than most people that aren't restoring a vintage television would need though.

Small ceramic core heating elements with standard screw bases work well, too. You often see them for cheap at swap meets and at surplus stores. I don't know if they are made anymore.
Rick

How about halogen bulbs. I don't know how long they would be available either or if it would work properly. Just a thought.

halogen would work fine, you'd just need an appropriate lamp holder.

gadget73 said:

halogen would work fine, you'd just need an appropriate lamp holder.

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I've seen halogen bulbs in standard household packages.