Neighbours threw out a gorgeous lamp, which had broken by the socket becoming disconnected from the wires. My housemate brought it home, and I tried rewiring it. Following an internet tutorial, I figured out which wire was hot and which was ground (necessary since I want to put LED bulbs in) and then wired the socket back in. Voila, it works… sort of!
The lights are really dim – subjectively like at most 10% as bright as they are in a different lamp. Tried both LED and CFL.
So I figured maybe I can finally put my engineering degree to use and bought a multimeter. Sure enough, resistance through the bulbs seems to be about 2 milliohms, but from the plug to the socket, about 300-500 milliohms. That would explain why the circuit is mostly not lighting up the bulb!
(Come to think of it, this would also explain why, when I tried testing which wire was hot and which was ground using a coin cell battery and a tiny standalone 5V LED, it worked with just battery & LED, but not when I tried to run the circuit through the lamp wire.)
…but what do I do about it? What's a likely source of the issue? I suppose maybe we could keep the lamp fixture and completely replace the wire & footswitch…
Best Answer
Likely is a bad switch, or a bad connection.
Unlikely is "high resistance wire"
And if you are planning to "put your engineering degree to use" please learn the difference in line connected items between "neutral" (Grounded) and "ground" (Grounding - safety ground - whole different thing.)
Your safest bet if low on real world experience is to rewire it as low-voltage DC. That way if you spork it up nobody gets hurt. Far too many internet tutorials are terrible, and if you don't know enough it's hard to sort the terrible form the good, and terrible can be quite unsafe...