Touch Lamp

Everybody needs a grope light. You know, that light that's easy to find and smack the switch when you need light in the middle of the night. Certainly there are plenty of lamps available with a nice easy rocker switch that serve this purpose but nothing is quite as easy for someone with paralyzed fingers than a touch lamp. Unfortunately, they are becoming a little bit harder to find and new bulb technology is causing them to function differently than they used to 10 years ago.

My favorite touch lamp, pictured above, still uses incandescent bulbs. Just a nice, small, 60 W chandelier bulb. The lamp is what controls the dim, medium and bright levels. Built into it is a relay that allows only so much wattage through at each of the three levels. Many touch lamps actually require special bulbs which contain three separate filaments and that is how the three levels of brightness is controlled. I understand that this is necessary for lamps of a higher maximum wattage but thankfully smaller bedside lamps do not need the special bulbs.

In most lamps like this CFL bulbs simply don't work. They only work with lamps that have on and off, not multiple levels of brightness. The bulbs that can either cause a malfunction or cause the lamp to no longer have three levels of brightness are LED bulbs. If you notice when you shop for either CFL or LED bulbs they give their ratings in two measurements, actual wattage and equivalent wattage. Eventually we will become accustomed to the amount of light put out by a 10 W LED bulb but for now most of us need to know that that is typically equivalent to the 60 W incandescent bulb that we all grew up with.

In the case of the touch lamp, where the settings are 20 W output for low, 40 W output for medium and 60 W for high, even on the low setting you have already exceeded the LED bulb's maximum draw. So, using that bulb in this lamp would give me high, high, high and off. There would be no low or medium settings. There is no danger in this case because the bulb will not draw more than it needs. The lamp is not going to try to push an extra 50 W of power through the bulb on what would normally be the brightest setting. However, some lamps that function differently have warnings about not using LED bulbs in them and some LED bulbs on IKEA's website indicate that they are not well-suited for all touch lamps. I used IKEA as an example because that is about the most affordable place to purchase LED bulbs.

I don't believe touch lamps are going to disappear forever but they have been becoming more difficult to find. It may simply be a matter of searching hard to find the right one and, before long, we may not enjoy the ease of waking up to a low or medium setting if on or off are our only options.

Source: Lamp – department stores and online.
Bulbs – most department stores but I have found the best deals at IKEA and dx.com.