LED converting an IKEA Espressivo desk lamp
Posted: Wed Oct 23, 2024 4:22 pm
In my quest to old-ify my life, I figured it'd be fitting with some 2+ decade old furniture-type stuff.
The Espressivo lamp from IKEA in the 90s-early 00s seemed very fitting, and is a bit of a classic. Mostly because everyone semingly had one, it nearly being banned, starting house fires and badly scalding children. All great things for a lamp.
With this in mind, and the fact that you can barely fucking get those 12V halogen bulbs any longer, I opted to LED convert it, using a generic G4 socket drop in replacement bulb. These are however meant to primarily run off the newer electronic high frequency drivers, which caused this one to give off a 50Hz noise, because this lamp uses a regular old transformer in its base. I fixed this by cutting the wires going to the bulb, and soldering a bridge rectifier and a capacitor in line, to feed the bulb DC instead. This fixed the problem completely, and it's now a really pretty nice desk lamp!
The LED bulb
In the base as it looks stock. the blue wires are heading up to the bulb
After installing the little rectifier and capacitor. Kinda hard to see..
And installed on the desk!
The Espressivo lamp from IKEA in the 90s-early 00s seemed very fitting, and is a bit of a classic. Mostly because everyone semingly had one, it nearly being banned, starting house fires and badly scalding children. All great things for a lamp.
With this in mind, and the fact that you can barely fucking get those 12V halogen bulbs any longer, I opted to LED convert it, using a generic G4 socket drop in replacement bulb. These are however meant to primarily run off the newer electronic high frequency drivers, which caused this one to give off a 50Hz noise, because this lamp uses a regular old transformer in its base. I fixed this by cutting the wires going to the bulb, and soldering a bridge rectifier and a capacitor in line, to feed the bulb DC instead. This fixed the problem completely, and it's now a really pretty nice desk lamp!
The LED bulb
- IMG_3890.JPG (166.98 KiB) Viewed 158 times
In the base as it looks stock. the blue wires are heading up to the bulb
- IMG_3891.JPG (172.46 KiB) Viewed 158 times
After installing the little rectifier and capacitor. Kinda hard to see..
- IMG_3892.JPG (157.76 KiB) Viewed 158 times
And installed on the desk!
- IMG_3893.JPG (187.85 KiB) Viewed 158 times