Thursday, October 23, 2008

Help! I need to buy this pretty lamp

I was one click away from purchasing two of these pretty ceramic lamps from Le Souk:
Pols Potten ceramic lamp
And thanks to the fall in the strength of the Euro, both lamps shipped whould have only cost me $102. But right before I clicked confirm order I realized (thank god) that since I'm ordering these lamps from a shop in the Netherlands the chance that I will be able to take the out of the box and plug them into my outlet here is the US is pretty slim. Does anyone have any experience rewiring European lamps? Is this and expensive process? If you know a shop would could do the work in New York or New Jersey would you mind sharing their info?

Photo credit: Le Souk


4 comments:

  1. I'm not familiar with rewiring lamps, but couldn't you use a power converter? Or does that eat up too much energy?

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  2. I read that converters do use a lot of energy so they're not really practical for everyday use.

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  3. I would think that this would be relatively simple, you'd just have to take out the original hardware and replace with new? Did you try to email leSouk to see if they've had international orders before?

    I found this instructional video on youtube,

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNcUst55t5s

    Looks quite simple actually.

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  4. Thanks for the link to the youtube video, I'm definitely going to check that out.

    I got in touch with leSouk and they responded rather quickly. Here's the guidance they offered:
    1) this is the easiest solution: you can buy a (travel) converter that converts 220/240 voltage to 110 voltage standard in the U.S. See for
    example: http://www.amazon.com/Lenmar-AC5-Travel-Adapter-Converter/dp/B00013BL18/ref=pd_sim_dbs_k_2.
    This is a set of 5 (for all continents) but you only need the one that adapts 220 volt to 110 volt (Europe to US power source). The price for such a converter will be $4 - 5.

    2) you can also change the plug from the lamp with a US plug that you can buy in a hardware / electricity store. This is not very difficult to do but you should know a little bit about wires & electricity (or ask somebody who know to do this..)

    I think I'm convinced that I can find a way to make these lamps work from me so I'm considering them a birthday present to myself. I might go with the converter for a short term solution but I'm confident in my handiness so I think some sort of rewiring will definitely be in my future.

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