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Electrical Wiring

Project

10 years ago

I'm making a 3D sculpture out of 48" florescence light bulbs. It's going to have 12 bulbs total. This is a quick sketch of it ,the green are bulbs I just threw in. I was going to wire dead bulbs together to get the shape but I want to know if there is any way I can wire new bulbs into this shape and connect them in a way to actually have the skulpture light up. This is for a college class and I have access to a lot of different electrical tools. If you could give me any advice that would be great !

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Ron Natalie
10 years ago
last modified: 10 years ago
You probably should ask this in the lighting forum, but yes, you can do this. You can buy the bulb ends and ballasts (and even colored covers for the bulbs) at 1000bulbs.com. Each ballast has wires that will drive some number of bulbs (typically 2 or 4). You can connect as many ballasts together on the primary (120V) side to drive as many bulbs as you want.

A ballast typically runs about $10. The sockets for the bulbs about $1.

You can probably fix the bulbs in place with just lots of hot melt glue. We do this for neon sculpture I've built. It will be a pain to replace burned out bulb, but I suspect this isn't a permanent installation, right?
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