That’s okay, I’m still laughing my a$$ off thinking about your post a few years back where you were anticipating spending much less time prepping for the year because with a couple years curriculum under your belt, you were just going to whip out the prior years slides…still beats starting from scratch, no?

Mr. K, I got six months out of an almost 5 year old projector by cleaning the filter. Makes me wish I’d done it sooner.

Cleaning the what now?

There’s a fan that blows air over the bulb to keep it cool. There is a filter to keep dirt from being blown all over the bulb. Classrooms have dust, so the filters get full and no longer pass air, which means that the bulb doesn’t get cooled which in turn shortens its life.

The filter is usually some little pullout screen with a slice of foam rubber – you just pull it out, smack it against the outside of your door and blow through it to get the dust off and slide it back in. I do that maybe every other month or so.

Using the projector for 8 hours/day for 200 days should be about 1/2 to 1/3 of the expected lifetime of a bulb.

I do wonder, though, how many projector bulbs you went through.