Replacement Bulbs for 17" lamp

Hi all,

new here, so please bear with me.

I have three Lava lamps, the two older ones (about twenty years old) need some replacement bulbs.

Now, I have tried 60W for the colder season and 40W for the spring/summer.

Problem is, the 40Ws still overheat the lamps and make the goo splinter in thousands of tiny bubbles instead of the mighty blobs.

I tried some 25W incandescent oven bulbs but they do not heat enough and the flow is pretty stiff (and besides, they don't do that much light...)

So, what would you suggest? What replacement type should I look for and of what type?

I understand Halogen can work, while LED doesn't heat up enough.

I'm from Italy, so E27 type bulb thread.

Thanx a lot.

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Johnny on May 28, 2020 at 4:17pm

It may be worth looking down the halogen bulbs as you could get a 30watt but get a 40watt brightness they do them so they look like a standard bulb shape, but you'll need to see what size the bulb is as in height so that you get a bulb that will fit in the holder and not hitting the bottle bottom.

Your bottles youve mentioned about 20 years old, the wax will have started to rare out and break down, which all lava lamps will do this, using the 60watt will just add to the demise of the wax :-(

Ive used halogen's in uk lamps which worked fine, standard bulb should have been a 40watt but found they over heated so went for one that gave 32watt in halogen terms, Ebay and amazon be your best bet. BUT make sure there nod LED but incandescent

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Lorenzo Gerace on May 29, 2020 at 8:33am

Thanx for the reply,

well, yeah, the wax has started to loose its hydrophoby and started getting liquid bubbles inside, which is not pretty. I may consider redoing it if I can find a suitable wax kit or recipe.

One of the lamps is running just fine with a 25W bulb after some time, looks like its stabilized even though the flow is a bit slow, but I like it.. It's a little less old than my first one which is the one I'm talking about above. 30W would be perfect, I'll look into halogen but so far I had no luck.

Thanx