ANSWERS: 6
  • I was an electrician and my opinion is yes, esp. with halogen. It can get VERY hot. Be safe! We want to keep you on AB!
  • You already got the right electrical answer from the electrician. I'll back his answer. As a firefighter, I have seen 3 fires started because a bulb was too intense for the fixture.
  • Sort of. If the manufacturer rates the fixture @ 75 watts, that is all it is designed to handle. If you were substituting a regular incandescent 90 watt lamp I would think you would be fine however, halogen lamps run EXTREMELY hot and there fore I would definitely advise against it.
  • As a lighting technician and someone who dabbles in more than basic electrical work, I can submit the following: 1. Even though smaller wattage (under 300w or so) halogen bulbs produce more light (or lumens) than their incandescent counterparts, this is where the advantages really end. There is a myth floating around that halogen bulbs use LESS electricity than an evenly rated incandescent. This is not true. While 100w halogen will be brighter than 100w incandescent, it still uses 100 watts - almost 1 Amp of the 15-20 usually available per household circuit. The advantage is you can usually use a smaller-RATED halogen bulb and have the same amount of light, while using less electricity. Try a 50w halogen in your 75w rated lamp and see if you like it. Your bill will be smaller, and your lamp's wiring will be happier, and you'll probably have the same amount of light. 2. That being said, the amount of heat CREATED by that kind of power is also the same, so in reality halogens do not create more heat than incandescents. The reason our fire-fighting friends have seen fires attributed to halogens is because the surface area over which the smaller halogen bulb has to dissipate the heat it creates is much smaller, and so the heat is more concentrated. (Which translates into a hotter surface, again while using the same amount of energy). It's a matter of cooling - the more surface area you have exposed to cooler air, the cooler the bulb can run. If you had a 100w bulb that ran on some technology that let you make it 100 feet long, it would generate very little, if even noticeable, heat. Make that same bulb smaller, and you will be dealing with greater and greater temperatures as the heat has no way to "get out" from the bulb. I hope this helps explain. Under any condition, know this: The manufacturer does not put a rating on their light fixture for their own health or to make you frustrated when you bought the wrong size bulbs at the store yesterday. If the wiring and accompanying hardware in the lamp is cheap, then the bulb rating will be lower, because, again, you run the risk of overheating the wires...which can become a fire hazard. It's the same reason you have 15 to 20 amp breakers in your home - if the load (the entire sum of power on any given circuit) exceeds, say, 20 amps, the breaker cuts the power and everything goes off. Why? So the wires do not overheat, smoke, and eventually catch fire. If you wanted to outfit your home with 6 gauge or 4 gauge wiring (which would be very expensive), you could install 60 amp breakers safely. (Only appliances that need that much power will have that kind of wiring, usually seen on 240 circuits feeding washers/dryers/air conditioners/hot tubs, anything with a motor.) You have 100 amps (usually) of "service" total in your home. Look at the size of the wires coming into your breaker box, and the size of the wires feeding out of each individual breaker. The larger wires are better conductors (of electricity and heat), and therefore have MUCH higher amperage ratings. The same holds true for your lamp. If it were intended to deliver 100 watts to your bulb, (which it will if you ask it to, and even more), it would have larger wiring or better hardware. IT IS A FIRE RISK TO USE A HIGHER WATTAGE BULB THAN YOUR LAMP IS RATED FOR. Sorry to take so long to say it. I figure most people are like me and want to know why. Hope that helped.
  • Yes you are in danger of starting a fire. A 90 watt light bulb will produce more heat then a fixture rated at 70 watts can handle. This will cause the components of the light fixture to become damager and can eventually cause the light fixture to fail and start a fire. The actual risk of this starting a fire is low but it is still higher then what is considered acceptable. Bill Lutz Generation 3 Electric, Inc. http://generation3electric.com http://www.philadelphia-electricians-how-to.com/
  • My electrician has been teaching me to do some of the basic repairs in my house so I don't bother him with small stuff. So I have pulled down a few fixtures and replaced them myself. Here is what he told me, and I saw the evidence of myself. A fixture is wired for the load it will handle. The gauge of the copper wire and the insulation on that copper wire are built to carry the load that is listed on that label. When you put a bigger load on it, the wiring starts to break down. Some of the lights I took down that I'd had bigger bulbs in had brittle, cracked insulation and nearly exposed copper in the box. If that exposed copper came in contact with something flammable, I'd have had a house fire. So now I am using compact fluorescents wherever I can. The CF bulb that gives the equivalent light of a 100 watt bulb only pulls something like 13 watts.

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