Light Bulb Replacement in Las Vegas

The bulb isn't the problem. The ladder is.

Nobody puts off changing a lamp bulb. What gets put off is the one in the two-story entry, the can light over the stairwell, or the fixture at the peak of a vaulted great room — because reaching it means a real ladder, on a hard tile floor, often over a stair tread where you can't get all four feet down flat. So the bulb stays out, and after a while the room just is a bit dark.

Valley homes are unusually good at generating this problem. The two-story entry with a chandelier is close to a regional signature, and vaulted living rooms with recessed cans are standard across most of the master-planned communities built from the nineties on. Then there's the outside: coach lights either side of the garage, a porch fixture, landscape and patio lighting that runs every evening for most of the year. Outdoor bulbs here work long hours in heat, and heat is what shortens a bulb's life more than anything else.

This is also the job with the worst consequences when it goes wrong. Falls from household ladders send a lot of people to hospital every year, and the odds get materially worse past sixty. We would rather bring our own ladder and our own footing four times a year than have anyone standing on a dining chair in a stairwell.

What we actually do

1. Walk the house with you at the start of the visit and note what's out, inside and out. Most people have stopped registering one or two.
2. Bring our own ladder, set up on a proper base, with a second person spotting where the position calls for it.
3. Match the replacement to the fixture — base type, wattage equivalent, and colour temperature matched to the other bulbs in the room so you don't end up with one blue-white can among five warm ones.
4. Wipe the lens or shade while it's open. On outdoor fixtures that's usually where half the lost light went.
5. Check the fixture seats and the switch works before the ladder comes down.
6. Take the old bulbs away and log what was changed and where.

How often, and what "as needed" means

Whenever they're out. There's no per-visit allowance to ration — if a bulb has gone in an awkward fixture, it gets changed on the next visit. LED bulbs mostly last, so for a normal home this is a handful of bulbs a year, and what you're really buying is someone to deal with the awkward ones as they go rather than a quota.

They don't have to be failures, either. If one is out and you'd rather we pre-emptively swap its neighbour in the same hard-to-reach fixture while the ladder is already up, say so and we'll do it — it saves us both a trip up there in three months.

The exception is a house that's suddenly eating bulbs. Repeated failures in one fixture are usually the fixture talking, not the bulbs, and we would rather tell you that than keep quietly replacing them every quarter.

Which plans include it

Included on Autopilot and Autopilot plus. Frequency is as needed, and the parts are in the price — you are never billed separately for them.

• Autopilot lite — $32.99/mo · not in this plan
• Autopilot — $69.99/mo · included
• Autopilot plus — $76.99/mo · included

Compare the Autopilot plans side by side.