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.
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!
These are awesome still. Replace the halogen bulb with an LED and you’re all set?
That's what I did. Still works great!
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 !
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
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.
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
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 still have one lol
I've still got one, but I converted the bulb to the equivalent of a 100w LED.
Occasionally a bug or a Nerf dart would end up in ours and you'd smell a gross burnt aroma 😅
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.
They also drew about as much current as a hairdryer. (Kidding - it was closer to a desktop PC, though.)
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.
I miss mine. They were awesome. Just don't touch the bulb when installing it.
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.
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