Lock LED hack

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Materials: LOCK Lamp, LED

Description:Some days ago the light bulb in my bathroom lamp died – again. It was one of those mercury based “long life” bulbs which I also bought from Ikea. Because it was not the first lamp on this place, and it was never really bright enough, I decided to “hack” the lamp.

I unscrewed the lamp from the ceiling, cleaned it an removed everything electrical in it. The only things left over were the metal dish, the glass bowl and the three plastic hooks. Then I placed roughly 80cm of led strip inside the dish (see picture) and connected everything electrically using a soldering iron and short pieces of copper wire. The led strip is driven by an efficient 12V power supply. The result is an extremely bright lock lamp (why do those projects always end in a lamp that is too bright?), which does not consume more than 6 Watts of electrical power. I expect that the lifetime of this hack will be much longer than cheap led based light bulbs, you can easily repair it if necessary.

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Well, this is not a revolution in design, but it is a nice way to demonstrate what can be done with state-of-the-art led technology.

Here is a list of the things I used to build the lamp: Lock lamp, ~0.8m of LED strip (7.2W per m, light temperature 3000K,  120 LEDs per m), one LED power supply (goobay SET 12-06 LED slim, 6€).