After breaking my old desk lamp, I’m looking at buying an Electrix 7395, but I’m worried that the 100w halogen bulb will be too bright.
So, is it possible to use a dimmer with this kind of halogen lamp? I assume it operates directly off of AC.
If so, anyone have a link to a site where I can buy such a dimmer? Preferably, one that simply sits between the lamp cord and the wall socket.
Isn’t halogen a gas filled bulb? I don’t think a dimmer switch will work. I could be wrong though.
One such as this should work nicely.
Yes, but so is a conventional incandescent bulb. Just different gas. I don’t think that in itself affects the ability to put a dimmer on it. You might be thinking of fluorescent bulbs. (I don’t know why you can’t put dimmers on (most) fluorescent bulbs.) I think some halogen desk lamps have a converter from AC 110v to some other voltage (don’t know if it converts to a stepped-down AC, or to DC); not sure how that affects the ability to put a dimmer on.
I have halogen bulbs on dimmers all over the office and at home.
Halogen is actually less prone to the humming sound other bulbs on dimmers sometimes make. Use a high quality dimmer switch and it will work flawlessly.
Using a dimmer on a halogen lamp is kinda like driving a Lambourgini at 10 miles per hour in Rush Hour traffic on your daily commute – it’s a misuse of the device that ignores its strengths.
The whole point of a halogen lamp is to counteract the efects of thermionic emission – the tendency of the atoms in the tungsten filament to “boil off” because of high temperatures. Eventually you lose too many atoms, the filament gets too thin, and physical shock or high eresistance melting breaks the filament, ruining the bulb.
Halogen lamps counteract this by adding some halogen gas to the envelope. Now boiled off tungsten atoms, instead of “plating out” on the relatively cool glass bulb walls will interact with the halogen gas and a lot of them end up redepositing on the filament. This extends bulb life.
The catch is, this only works at high temperatures. If you runn a tungsten halogen bulb below its rating, this nifty redepositing effect doesn’t happen (or else happens at a much, much slower rate), so the bulb doesn’t last as long, and you’re paying extra for a bulb that’s doing a job that could be done more cheaply by a non-halogen bulb.
In fact, all other things being equal, a non-halogen bulb would prefer to be run at lower wattage. Bulb lifetime scales with some ridiculously high power of voltage – the 12th power or something like that. So if you’re running at reduced output your bulb life will increase dramaticcally even without halogen.
Bottom line is that there’s no reason you can’t run a halogen bulb dim. But it’s just as good and cheaper to run a non-halogen bulb low.
Nice lamp, but maybe overkill unless you’re a professional artist or graphics designer?
Try this one from Staples. 100 watts and the dimmer is built in.