Ceiling Fan Lamp
*Dead* light LIT up a few seconds AFTER i pulled it out of the socket! How?
1) I Removed a Dead Light Bulb (Compact flourescent type) out of my ceiling fan lamp.
2) I had it in one and i had the new compact flourescent bulb in my OTHER hand.
3) About 10 seconds into this, The DEAD bulb lit fully up in my hand for roughly 1 - 1.5 seconds and spooked me so much i nearly fell off the chair I was standing on!
Can anyone with knowledge of light bulbs explain what caused this phenomenon?
I can imagine how freaky this must have been, but no worries, it's
perfectly explainable.
First of all, most people don't know it but it's not necessary for a
fluorescent lamp to be plugged in for it to light up. All you need is
a nearby high voltage, high frequency power supply that is pumping electrical energy
into the air. A good example of this is a Tesla coil. Check out this video:
This works because fluorescent lamps work differently from incandescent lamps. In the incandescent lamp, electricity has to flow
through wires, produces heat due to resistance, and the wire gets really hot and glows. In the fluorescent lamp, an electrical transformer known as a ballast, turns electricity into high voltage, high frequency electric
fields that span the inside of the tube and excite mercury atoms to glow.
There are no wires inside the tube. So if you immerse the fluorescent lamp into any space that contains these electric fields, it will glow, just like in the video.
(a compact fluorescent lamp is the same as a tube lamp, just folded up
and miniaturized).
Now, you may be saying "fine, but I don't have a Tesla coil on my
kitchen table, so how's this happening?". But the fact is that you do
have Tesla coils all around, in different forms. Another nearby compact fluorescent lamp, which has a self-contained
miniature Tesla coil inside it (which is why they don't need ballasts). Or any nearby standard fluorescent lamp, which does have a ballast, is putting out these fields. Even motors, microwaves, and televisions are sources of these high frequency electric fields, which can light up a lamp if its held
in just the right position, at the right distance, if even temporarily.
Heck, even static electricity can do it if it's strong enough.
So your job is to look around the room and try to figure out what is the closest source of these fields that might have been turned on when you
were in the process of changing that lamp, and that's your culprit. It's even possible that it was something outside of the room that put out a
spiked electrical field (a neighbor's television, lightning, etc.).
Now that you know what to look for, try to reproduce the phenomenon by walking around the room with another bulb in your hand. Once you
can reproduce it, think how fun this could be at your next party!
Lastly, it's not that unusual for a "dead" fluorescent tube to still be able
to give off light. A dead incandescent lamp contains a wire that is physically broken, so that no current can flow. It is 100% dead. But with
the fluorescent lamp, there are no internal wires. What usually goes bad is the tiny circuit board inside, which prevents the lamp from being able to generate its high voltage field. But if you supply the field from some
outside source, then the lamp still contains everything else it needs to
glow. And that's exactly what it did...freaking you out in the process.
I hope this helps~
What Is On YouTube Today?
Objects into Ceiling Fan Finale (Lamp Disaster)
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