Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought two 80W units for my farm. I hung them from shepherds hooks in my yard and connected them to timers that turn on at dusk and off at dawn. They do a wonderful job of keeping down the flies and other bugs that come along with livestock. However, each unit contains a pair of bulbs, and every single one of the included bulbs failed before the end of the season. To use these units this year, I am now looking at spending almost $40 to replace the bulbs. Given this 100% failure rate, should I expect this as an annual expense? The first bulb died before the end of summer (<3 months) and the last died before the first freeze. That’s an average life of ~6 months at <30% duty cycle, or on the order of 1000 hours of life. That seems like an unreasonably low lifetime for a UV bulb in this modern day and age. This kind of gross waste stinks of an intentionally self-destructing product design: are the bulbs built to fail as a means of generating more revenue? Or is Flowtron simply incapable of producing a quality product? Does it matter which hypothesis is correct? EDIT: I begrudgingly ordered new bulbs and discovered that the starter bulbs were also fried. Those cannot be ordered from anyone but Flowtron, and their shipping costs are astronomically exorbitant. What a racket.....