In trying to configure her home office, Kelly from View Along the Way ran into what she describes as a very "hush-hush" problem for designers: the lamp cord. Rather than working around unsightly or trip-causing cords, Kelly and her husband figured out a clever, inexpensive way to get rid of the problem altogether.
Check out this delightful "after" photo. For those of us who have wrestled with cords time and time again, it almost seems too good to be true.
This hack should work on any corded lamp, and all it takes are the few simple materials below:
• Lamp
• 9-volt battery or 8 AA batteries
• 9-volt battery clip or an 8 AA battery pack
• Wire strippers
• Strand of LED lights
• Soldering iron
• Optional: Velcro and felt to cover the bottom of the lamp
• [in the words of Kelly] Optional: brilliant husband
How well does it work? According to Kelly,
So far, so good! We've run the light for about 8 hours total and it's still going strong. If you'd like your lamp to be on the brighter side, opt for the 8-battery pack, because it offers 12 volts of power. The 9-volt will run slightly dimmer.
For step-by-step pictures, instructions, and links to buy the materials Kelly and her husband used, visit View Along the Way.
(Images: View Along the Way)
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I get the cordless appeal, but the thought of going thru all those batteries (even if they're rechargeable) kinda bums me out.
Our front hallway has no outlets in it, and only an overhead light. Which is great sometimes, but mostly just too bright to leave on all the time. I wish I could put two lamps on a console to light the space, and I've been dying for someone to invent a battery-powered lightbulb! Something that just screws into a regular lightbulb socket, but is battery powered, no outlet required! A girl can dream, right?
DanielleM: I don't understand. You're not going through batteries if they're rechargeable. You just have to recharge them occasionally. We do that with our laptops all the time, and they can draw just as much power as a lightbulb would.
mzp: Again, I don't understand your complaint. Why not just put a lower-wattage bulm in the overhead light, or put it on a dimmer.
Those reel-lights are AMAZING, I appreciate so very much being turned on to their existence! While I have misgivings about the "quality" (meaning color) of LED light in some settings, still I'm very excited by this. On the blog, they've used these to light their bookshelves, for example, and the AMOUNT of light seems incredible.
An FIVE-METER reel costs less than $9.... compare that to, for example, LED strip lights at Ikea which are VERY expensive, IMO (and most require a cord system that costs even more).
This post really brightened my day. I didn't intend that pun, either!
This is a pretty clever idea, really. One has to go through a little adventure to get it done but, hey, this is Fall season with certainly some rainy times to be spent at home doing some arts and crafts and, why not, this hack. I'm seriously considering this method as I'm currently looking for a bedside lamp and wires were just the things that bother me...
I got things to recharge at home and it is not a hassle to deal with, especially when I charge them overnight.
this is brilliant! I also love the tutorial on this site for under shelf LED lighting - so simple, so cheap, this is a good thing (as Martha Stewart once said)
I have enough electronics to charge on a regular basis. I can live with lamp cords.
If you use rechargeable batteries, keep in mind that they are 1.2 volts, as compared to alkaline AA at 1.5v. You'll need 10 rechargeables to equal 8 regular to get 12 volts.
This is brilliant, too bad I cannot use it for a lamp with a fabric shade (I immediately planned to try it but that was before I stepped through the instructions).
Brilliant, nevertheless. Thanks for sharing.
Hi, Kelly from View Along the Way here. We have a post coming up on how to do this for lamps with shades. Hopefully next week!
The problem with light-quality from LEDs isn't simply their colour. LEDs actually are tricking your eye into thinking it's getting way more information than it is, and creates a disorienting and dead quality of light that has nothing to do with whether it's weight to blue, red, or green. A normal white light is made up of a reasonably balanced collection of pretty much every frequency in our visible spectrum. If you look at the Spectral Energy Distribution for an ordinary white light, it pretty much looks like this: http://tinyurl.com/8ahemxu which is a slightly warm white light. Alternatively, you could filter some of those frequencies to make a bright red light: http://tinyurl.com/8fs5rc6. With that filtered red, you're only going to be getting information back that can reflect those frequencies, so "everything looks red" in red light because you're only seeing the redness of things. An object that is perfectly primary blue without any red to it at all will look weird and black in red light because it's not giving you as much information as you're used to seeing. LEDs, on the other hand, give you even less. Where that red SED curve was a wide section of frequencies from the red end of the spectrum, a red LED is one very narrow spike. Same with blue and green. You're not just being limited to the information in that one area of the spectrum, now you're only seeing what can reflect that one narrow band within that area. And then we mix them, and it looks white to us, because we've got red, blue, and green information coming in, but it's not that broad SED like the warm white light, now it's three balanced spikes. So your eye gets tricked into thinking it can see everything, but you'll find yourself losing depth perception, trying to focus and not quite being able to See the thing you're looking at, and everything looks dull and flat. LEDs are evil.
@HurlyBurlesque thanks for the information. I find LED lights extremely intense and disorienting, and I can't understand why anyone can tolerate them. They are like sharp knives of light to my eyes instead of a gentle sweep of a regular light. Perhaps my eyes know they are being tricked somehow.
AKA how to ruin a perfectly good lamp with unsightly LED lights.
Batteries ? and not getting effective lighting ?
Forget the cordless lamp.
http://www.hsn.com/as-seen-on-tv/insta-bulb-battery-operated-light-bulb-4-pack_p-6843138_xp.aspx
I'm a big fan of outlets built into floors.