tall halogen lamps with a dimmer knob on them

[xy]

Mr. Dorsey now has me thinking about dimmer stuff.

Are those tall halogen lamps with a circular top bad news in a studio?
I'm talking about the basic lamps you can buy at Home Depot and they
have a little knob on the pole to adjust the brightness of the halogen
lamp.

[Josh Snider]

They could be. But they typically are resistive dimmers as opposed to
inductive dimmers so they may not cause as much of a problem.

Just my bit anyway.

J


--
josh.snider
cave.productions
416.524.6927





in article , xy at
wrote on 9/4/03 23.00:

> Mr. Dorsey now has me thinking about dimmer stuff.
>
> Are those tall halogen lamps with a circular top bad news in a studio?
> I'm talking about the basic lamps you can buy at Home Depot and they
> have a little knob on the pole to adjust the brightness of the halogen
> lamp.

[Scott Dorsey]

xy > wrote:
>Mr. Dorsey now has me thinking about dimmer stuff.
>
>Are those tall halogen lamps with a circular top bad news in a studio?
> I'm talking about the basic lamps you can buy at Home Depot and they
>have a little knob on the pole to adjust the brightness of the halogen
>lamp.

The dimmers in them are bad news, but the lamps themselves run at 120V
so you can bypass the dimmer and just run them full-on.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Kurt Albershardt]

xy wrote:
>
> Are those tall halogen lamps with a circular top bad news in a studio?
> I'm talking about the basic lamps you can buy at Home Depot and they
> have a little knob on the pole to adjust the brightness of the halogen
> lamp.

Halogen torchieres? Not an issue except for the aforementioned crappy
dimmers, their fairly high heat output in most cases--and the
accompanying tendency to burn down the building when they tip over.

[Richard Crowley]

"Josh Snider" wrote ...
> They could be. But they typically are resistive dimmers as opposed to
> inductive dimmers so they may not cause as much of a problem.

All the ones I've ever seen were phase-angle, "hash"-
producing SCR dimmers. You can't dim those 100s
of watts with that tiny little pot (and no heat generation!)

[Justin Ulysses Morse]

Yes, they're bad news. They hum like crazy. They're also incredibly
inefficient. 300W bulbs blasting at the ceiling, but you're not
looking at the ceiling.

What I'm really into lately are the little high-efficiency fluorescents
that screw into incandescent fixtures. Unlike the big old fluorescent
tubes, these things don't make noise (unles you try to put them on a
dimmer, then they freak out). They put out a much more attractive
color of light than either incandescents or the old-fashioned tubes
too, and if you do the math you see the energy cost savings far
outweighs the purchase cost difference.

And most importantly, they do more than their share to ween us off of
Dick Cheney's greasy tits.

Eerie, an incandescent bulb just popped while I was typing this.

ulysses



In article >, xy
> wrote:

> Mr. Dorsey now has me thinking about dimmer stuff.
>
> Are those tall halogen lamps with a circular top bad news in a studio?
> I'm talking about the basic lamps you can buy at Home Depot and they
> have a little knob on the pole to adjust the brightness of the halogen
> lamp.

[Analogeezer]

(xy) wrote in message >...
> Mr. Dorsey now has me thinking about dimmer stuff.
>
> Are those tall halogen lamps with a circular top bad news in a studio?
> I'm talking about the basic lamps you can buy at Home Depot and they
> have a little knob on the pole to adjust the brightness of the halogen
> lamp.


I think so, Lionel Hampton almost died and burned up his apartment
with halogen lamps.

I'd keep them away from gear and certainly away from any kind of sound
insulation foam.

Analogeezer

[Jay Kadis]

In article >
(xy) writes:
> Mr. Dorsey now has me thinking about dimmer stuff.
>
> Are those tall halogen lamps with a circular top bad news in a studio?
> I'm talking about the basic lamps you can buy at Home Depot and they
> have a little knob on the pole to adjust the brightness of the halogen
> lamp.

The ones I had sent noise over the power circuit if the dimmer was used. Full
on they were OK. They also burned up within a year.

-Jay
--
x------- Jay Kadis ------- x---- Jay's Attic Studio ----x
x Lecturer, Audio Engineer x Dexter Records x
x CCRMA, Stanford University x http://www.offbeats.com/ x
x-------- http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/~jay/ ----------x

[Edvard Puskaric]

On 4 Sep 2003 20:00:27 -0700, (xy)
wrote:

>Mr. Dorsey now has me thinking about dimmer stuff.
>
>Are those tall halogen lamps with a circular top bad news in a studio?
> I'm talking about the basic lamps you can buy at Home Depot and they
>have a little knob on the pole to adjust the brightness of the halogen
>lamp.

If you want a dimmer in your studio, wire all the to-be-dimmed
lighting on a circuit and use a suitable variac.

[Justin Ulysses Morse]

Jay Kadis > wrote:

> The ones I had sent noise over the power circuit if the dimmer was used.
> Full
> on they were OK. They also burned up within a year.

That's right, they're also unreliable. I've got two of them sitting
around that I don't use (had three), and they go through expensive
bulbs quickly, as well as the dimmer circuitry has an annoying tendency
to crap out and require replacement. You can buy replacements fairly
cheap, but I see no reason to get these two lamps going again with
everything else stacked against them.

ulysses