Post #214599 by WillTiki on Tue, Feb 14, 2006 11:59 AM

Those compact flourescents not only get hot, but they burn out prematurely if used in a "closed fixture". The Ikea ones did not have that info on their packaging but the Sylvania GE ones did. I put one in an overhead bathroom combo fan/light fixture and got less time out of it than a regular incandescent bulb and the ceramic base turned from white to dark tan from the heat. Sticking to a conventional but low wattage 7 or 15 W should not be very hot and damaging to the fish if there is a way for the heat to get out (see below)

I bought a premade pufferfish light on ebay a while back and it had an interesting design. The hole in the top of the fish has a short tube of bamboo epoxied into it. The bamboo tube gives you something other than the cut fish skin to attach the socket clips to plus it has 3 short chains connecting to a ring to hang it from. This is a lot safer (and according to code for many places)than hanging the lamp directly from the power cord. A big plus though is the fact that the oversized hole in the bamboo leaves room for the heat from the bulb to escape since it does not need to be a tight fit to support hanging the lamp from the socket.

TikiTikiBoom brought up a good point about the candelabra sockets; they are almost perfectly sized to convert live flame tiki torches to electric. I used the flicker flame bulbs to give the illusion of fire for indoor use. It might look interesting in the fish as well.

[ Edited by: WillTiki 2006-02-14 12:03 ]