Lamps telling you to use a certain wattage of bulb (used, work)

[robertpasa]

Lamps or light fixtures often have a sticker telling you not to use a bulb more than 60 Watts. What would happen if I used a more powerful bulb? Would the whole thing blow up?

Sometimes 60 W is not bright enough.

[Pitt Chick]

Maybe not blow up, but you CAN start a fire!

If 60 watts is not bright enough for you, try CFLs or get different light fixtures.

[BigDGeek]

Originally Posted by robertpasa

Lamps or light fixtures often have a sticker telling you not to use a bulb more than 60 Watts. What would happen if I used a more powerful bulb? Would the whole thing blow up?

Sometimes 60 W is not bright enough.

Buy a 100w lamp. Or get another 60w lamp.

You should not use a 100w bulb in a 60w fixture. It's not designed to dissipate heat fast enough to handle that wattage which can result it anything ranging from shortened bulb life all the way up to your lamp catching on fire and burning your house down.

This is true for incandescent bulbs, anyway.

Try using a 100w "equivalent" CFL bulb and see what happens. Those don't get very hot.

[harry chickpea]

This is kind of the type of question - "If I stick my finger on the hot burner..."
The result will not be a happy one. That is really all you need to know.

I've noticed that the zip cord for some lamps now have really thin conductors - maybe even as small as 22 g. on some accent lamps. Those cords would likely just fry, become open circuit and make the lamp never work again.

All sorts of other things can happen. Plastics change character and become brittle or deformed, electronic components fail, the lamp gets too hot to handle, etc.

[Rabrrita]

Originally Posted by robertpasa

Lamps or light fixtures often have a sticker telling you not to use a bulb more than 60 Watts. What would happen if I used a more powerful bulb? Would the whole thing blow up?

Sometimes 60 W is not bright enough.

Look at the sticker, if it's a new product, it may have the bulb type symbol. If it looks like a regular incandescent light bulb (or says incandescent) and says 60 watts max, that fixture is designed only for a 60 watt incandescent light bulb. Do not use a higher wattage incandescent.

One solution is to use an LED light bulb. LED's can have higher equivalent light output with much lower wattage use. So an 18 watt LED bulb may be a 100 Watt incandescent equivalent. Additionally, with LED bulbs you have a range of "colors" or how the light looks. It can be a soft white, warm white, bright white all the way up to daylight.