What I remember most about them is that they were extremely effective as unintentional bug zappers. The SMELL of instantly vaporized burnt moths in the room is something I'll likely never forget.
I'm tall so sometimes I was the first person in ages to discover a bug graveyard at someones place.
Oh yeah! I forgot.
Lucky you
Around 2004 we had some people over for a card game night. We were all sitting on our house's big terrace, where we had also put this type of lamp. The terrace was open to the outside and the lamp attracted a large amount of bugs, which would burn and start to smell, the same smell you are remembering.
To stop this from happening, my brother decided to put a kind of glass plate on top of the lamp as a cover. Initially this worked great and the smell was gone.
10 minutes later, the glass had gotten so hot that it exploded violently, shooting shards of glass all across the terrace. It was a lesson learned.
Yeah use quartz next time.
I had one of these! I want to say it was purchased in the late 90s and lasted until around 2006 before I finally threw it in the garbage lol! They definitely were not stable and once it fell over the bulb would usually break around 50% of the time... Also once it fell over or even if it just got moved a little bit all the parts that screwed together would get loose and the lamp would stand crooked and wobble until you tightened it all back up again!
Threadlock worked well here.
I don't doubt it! I did not know what thread locker was in 2002 though...
These are awesome still. Replace the halogen bulb with an LED and you’re all set?
That's what I did. Still works great!
But then you don't get the sweet aroma of all the bug corpses toasting around the bulb.
Well not super fast bbq on 500 deg high heat, you just slow roast them like smoking at like 140 for hours… they taste better that way
I still use one of these
Same! I read this and thought "Remember? I'm sitting right next to mine."
The candle that burns twice as bright will burn your fucking house down
They also put out a huge amount of heat ! Quite useful in old high rise flats !
Good for heating the ceiling anyway
Knock them over and put the heat where it belongs
I don't know when this started but most bedrooms don't even have a ceiling light anymore, so you still need these floor lamps.
Cheap construction. That was really prevalent in the 60s and 70s, I'm finding a lot of those in my current house hunt
There's a housing project in my town that's the most depressing place I could imagine living. It's like a cross between Soviet block housing and a minimum security prison: concrete walls, little natural light, and steel doors. The only room in the apartments that have built in lighting is the bathroom since it's required by code.
It's entirely a cost thing: the goal was to make "housing" that requires the minimum in maintenance and repair. To that end they went with "durability is more important that livability" and offloading as much responsibility onto the tenants as possible.
That's weird i just bought a new construction house and every room has a fan and light
I noticed this too, I assumed it was a style/trend thing as things tend to cycle in and out, but could also be about regulations and/or location. House I grew up built in the 50's had built-in ceiling lights. House I moved to built in 1990 didn't and I saw that as "this is the new way, ceiling lights are old fashioned". Now I live in a house built in 2015 and it has built-in ceiling lights.
I used to put my socks on these as a kid cause it'd warm them up. I ended up forgetting them one day and there was a fucking roaring fire coming out of the top of the bowl within minutes.
These would be much easier to do with LEDs but somehow they didn't survive the transition.
Who’s wants upward directional lighting at ceiling height? They were a horrendous design that only lit the room up, not great for reading or crafting.
People who want the entire room lit up with fairly soft lighting?
I do, this is a great lighting technique for someone who does not want direct lighting
I have issues with light sensitivity. These were a godsend for bright but indirect lighting.
Your ceilings must be very low. If they're very close to the ceiling, of course they won't work well. But regular 8' ceilings were fine with them.
Many had a dimmer, are you sure yours wasn't turned way down?
I still have one, it's in the basement, unused (kept it for use while we renovate that room). We have an LED version in our living room that is the primary light in that room, and it works fine for illuminating everything. I regularly read receipts and paper bills in that room without an issue.
Girl I was dating in the mid 2000’s was sleeping with one of these lamps in her dorm room. One of those desks on the floor and bed up top bunkbed setups and her pillow fell onto the bulb needless to say the pillow got really nicely burnt. Luckly it didn’t catch fire
Strangely enough last night my home didn't burn down either.
Those things have been around since the 60s
That I did not know.
Well you wouldve had to be there heh. Just shows that style is cyclicle
I swapped mine for an LED-equivalent bulb.
Yep. IKEA has a bunch of models. It's really great for providing indirect light to a whole space to combat glare. Mine also has a little reading light.
I've still got one, but I converted the bulb to the equivalent of a 100w LED.
Equivalent of 100w LED? That's uhh... A lot of light.
What lighting technology is it? A 120W sodium vapor lamp from a streetlight? A 200W inductively driven fluorescent torus? A 1000W incandescent monster?
I still have one lol
How many bugs are inside it?
Too afraid to look.
🤷♀️
Occasionally a bug or a Nerf dart would end up in ours and you'd smell a gross burnt aroma 😅
I had one of those in my bedroom all the way until about 2021.
Until 2019 for us damn cats broke it. Now I have a lamp photographer use for a lamp.
Doubles as fly killer. Remember hearing a couple zap on that fucking food service light
Ah, the smell of freshly burnt bugs. We once had a giant moth catch on fire which shot several inches above the top of the lamp and set off the smoke detector. The apartment reeked for days.
I almost burned a neighbors house down by forgetting about a piece of cloth I put on that badboy for mood lighting.
Mood lighting lol.
Older gen Z here, I remember these really strongly.
People always forget gen Z was alive for these kind of things and I'm starting to think nobody realizes how old we actually are. Most people you think of as gen Z are only really on the younger end of gen Z. Some of us are in our late 20s now and also struggling to understand kids these days.They also drew about as much current as a hairdryer. (Kidding - it was closer to a desktop PC, though.)
They also made great pretend/play jousting lances, though all the insects that were dead inside of it would get all over the place as you swung those things around, but still, good times (at least until you got caught doing that).
And changing the bulb on one of those that newly burned out was like trying to work with lava.
All the halogen/fluorescent/etc bulbs before LED were super hot if you didn't let them cool down for a couple minutes.
But really, who under 40 ever waited for them to cool down? Nobody had time for that.
the insects were just the bonus poison/psychic hybrid damage
I miss mine. They were awesome. Just don't touch the bulb when installing it.
I saw one of the bulbs burn out once, four inch flames straight out of the top.
Yeah we never had one (poor} but I remember hearing that they caused their share of house fires
Remember? I still have it!
Surprised how many people still do. If it ain't broke don't fix it I suppose.
My sister and I once caught a paper airplane on fire from one of these, got scortchmarks on the couch under it
Well i walked over to the other room to check but mine doesn’t have that bulb/disk on the pole
If you look up The Sharper Image in an encyclopedia, it has a picture of this lamp and a vibrating pillow.
And a sleep mask!
Never had one. Didn't know anyone who had one. Is this an American thing?
Had one in Germany, they were quite common here. Worked well as a bug zapper, there was the occasional smell of crispy moths...
Were they expensive? I grew up hunting feral pigeons for food and we were by no means the poorest family in the area.
I seen a lot of them in France I still have one in case of a lightbulb dying
Definetly an American thing. First time seeing this lamp.
Apparently not a popular opinion with someone.
I still have one
I'm pretty sure the lamp my parents had in the late 90s/early 2000s was the one they moved into the house with in the late 70s, there was none of this fanciness in our house
I do not. I lived in a house that had ceiling lights and chandeliers in every room, so we didn't have any lamps other than a couple desk lamps.
I remember it being a PITFA to change the bulbs, though. Two of the chandeliers were in awful places. 1 was at the top of the central ceiling which was essentially 3 stories from the floor and the other was directly over the stairs, where you couldn't really position a ladder safely.
We had a stained glass chandelier in my 1980s childhood bungalow that was perfectly placed to bonk your head on as you stood up from the table. The bulb burned out and the whole thing pretty much disintegrated trying to change it
I have two of these, they stopped working but I can’t bring myself to throw them away.
Ah yes, that "I'm going to fix them eventually" mood.
I had two of them!
