Floor lamp made from conventional fluorescent tube?

by philg

A lot of companies make floor lamps that are designed to produce a vertical strip of light. Here’s an example from Target. The conventional way to do this is to cover the light source with a vertical paper shade. To get the illumination to be reasonably even, you put three 60-watt light bulbs inside. The result is a fairly cheap lamp that burns a lot of electricity, wastes most of the energy into heat that might set the shade on fire, and whose light is not very uniform across the shade.

This makes me wonder why there aren’t more floor and table lamps made with conventional fluorescent tubes. If you want a strip of light, why not start with a line-shaped light source? It is hardly the case that fluorescent fixtures are expensive. A two-bulb 4′ fluorescent fixture can be purchased at Home Depot for less than $20.

The quality of light from a fluorescent bulb can be excellent, with 5000K (daylight) color temperature and high color rendering index (CRI). A photographer’s light table uses just such a fluorescent tube. A fluorescent light might be too bright at full power for many floor lamp uses, but it can be electronically dimmed (vendor).

If Dan Flavin could make sculpture from fluorescent light bulbs in 1963, how come we can’t get something vaguely like it at Walmart 40+ years later?

[Of course I recognize that the modern way to do this would be a strip of LEDs, but right now I think they have poor CRI and can’t be fabricated in a continuous strip.]

12 thoughts on “Floor lamp made from conventional fluorescent tube?”

  1. Have a look at the Pablo Designs Brazo floor lamp. It features a strip of white LEDs, and the CRI is pretty good (I use the desk version on my nightstand). You can get it at Room & Board and Design Within Reach, among others.

    Of course, in the future you’d just have a stip of OLED, but we’re still at least 10 years from that.

  2. The answer is probably that people still associate light from a fluorescent tube as cold, uncomfortable and flickering.

    Of course that is not true with modern tubes and electronic ballasts but it is so difficult to overcome prejudice.

    I mentioned modern T5 tubes with electronic ballasts in an LED forum (in Germany) because several people struggled to illuminate whole rooms with LEDs and the response was very negative.

    People associated fluorescent light tubes with the dull and flickering illumination of an old railway station toilet (that was really what someone posted) and they said that they banned fluorescent light tubes from their homes.

    My computer room is illuminated by two 28 Watt T5 “Narva BioVital” tubes (five band, full spectrum, daylight 5800K, CRI > 90) and I’m happy with the even light distribution.

  3. Actually Walmart (online) does have such a thing called Lite Source Slender Fluorescent One Light Floor Lamp in Chrome.

  5. Fazal: I checked out http://www.pablodesigns.com/task/brz/brz/desc.html and it looks like it only produces light in one direction, i.e., that it is a reading lamp. I want something that lights the whole room.

    Tom, thanks for those. They are very cold and stark. Why can’t I have a Japanese-style paper shade around a tube instead of just the tube? They are also fairly pricey. A $40 lamp designed for incandescent bulbs and a few CF bulbs would be a lot cheaper.

    Everyone: This is why the economy is sucking wind. Even the simplest products that you’d imagine wanting to buy aren’t available at any price!

  6. Hello Phil,

    Your latest blog entry has a nice coincidence with a product, that a customer of ours just showed on trade fair in the Netherlands:

    http://www.bb-lightconcepts.eu/images/stories/pdf/BrochureN-E-D.pdf

    You might want to have a look into the brochure. These pipes have been developed as successor for the conventional fluorescent tubes. Energy consumption will be significantly lower. The use of LEDs as originating light source is planned for the near future.

    Another interesting developement in this segment are the new LED “Lightbulbs” by Philips.

    http://www.newscenter.philips.com/about/news/press/20090507_master_led.page

    Conventional Lightbulbs that emit more heat than light will be phased out in the European Union from 2010.

    I hope some of the info was of your interest.

    Best regards.

    Martin
    (Cologne, Germany)

  9. Uwe,

    What about noise? Apart from the flicker I associate fluorescent tubes with a buzzing noise.

  10. If someone can point me to a source of fluorescent bulbs with as close as possible to daylight color balance (5000k?) and a high color rating index (CRI), that would be great. I need the ones that screw into a regular light bulb socket. Any recommendations?

  11. You might be able to DIY one:

    biax bulb base: http://www.coollights.biz/watt-5600k-high-biax-bulbs-p-37.html

    bulb clip: http://www.coollights.biz/2g11-bulb-clip-p-40.html

    “Happy Brand” Electronic Ballast http://www.coollights.biz/t5ho-universal-voltage-ballast-p-98.html – you can probably find one that is 55w x 1 for your application

    their bulbs are not high quality. buy these instead:
    kino flo daylight 95 CRI bulb http://www.filmtools.com/kiflotrmacod.html

    these bulbs put out a non-trivial amound of UV. You should filter this with a UV blocking gel and some diffusion of some sort.

    I did not make a floor lamp but a video lamp using this equipment and it works good. Much cheaper than buying one. And it does not buzz because it does not have a magnetic ballast.

    -sgs

  12. @Peter
    > Uwe,
    > What about noise? Apart from the flicker I associate
    > fluorescent tubes with a buzzing noise.

    The buzzing noise comes from the 50/100 Hz (60/120 Hz in the US) vibration created by the large coil of electromagnetic ballasts. The newer electronic ballasts don’t have a large coil, operate at around 30 kHz and are therefore silent.

    @Gregory Clos
    > If someone can point me to a source of fluorescent bulbs
    > with as close as possible to daylight color balance (5000k?)
    > and a high color rating index (CRI), that would be great.
    > I need the ones that screw into a regular light bulb socket.
    > Any recommendations?

    There is the Narva BioVital

    http://www.narva-bel.de/index/70000_download/71000_free_area/biovital/biovital_4_englisch.pdf

    but I don’t know if there is a 110V version. The 230V version is widely available in northern/western Europe for around 15 Euro (20 $US).

    It’s rated with 15.000 hours life expectancy and the efficiency is not as high as other lamps with a lower CRI. I have the 15 Watt version but wish I would have bought the 20 Watt model.

    As far as I know Philips and Osram (Sylvania in the US) do not produce daylight color screw-in light bulbs.

    There are some other products but I saw only fantasy brand names which did not reveal the real manufacturer.

Comments are closed.