Factory Lights

Here's a project that combines everything I love: lights, retro-futuristic steampunk industrialism, and playing with electricity.

At my request for some neat industrial lighting stuff, a heroic individual at BC Hydro rescued these two metal halide fixtures from smelting after they were replaced in the name of energy conservation. They had a decade's worth of soot on them, so I had to give them a good bath first (during which I sliced my finger open and squirted blood on the ceiling). Then, I removed the ballasts and rewired them to accept normal light bulbs, because I don't really need kilowatt bulbs to bake my single-room loft. Along with the ballasts went 90% of their weight, so now they can hang easily from the sprinkler pipes. With a fixture this big, a fat albert bulb is really the only option. I found a couple at the Vancouver ReStore along with some suitably chunky plugs.

Sure they're energy inefficient, but they're recycled.