[polyglot]

Make sure you use a slow-blow fuse. A fast-blow fuse on the primary of a transformer will be destroyed by inrush current, as you've found.

Edit: you don't need ceramic (sand-filled) fuses for this application, that's total overkill in terms of blocking. They're meant for use with hugely inductive loads and high-power applications, e.g. where the fault-current might be much larger than the operational current. The idea is that the gas in a glass fuse can form a plasma but that sand will not. Edit 2: ceramic fuses are not slow-blow, therefore they *will* fail early.