![]() ![]() The metal or glass lamps could easily crack your skull or kill a pet if they fell. All of these lamps are much heavier on the bottom than on the top, and in the unlikely event that one manages to fall over, being hit by the plastic top is likely to be just very annoying rather than breaking something or causing serious injury. The multi-armed �octopus-style� lamps also have plastic shades. Depending on the lamp, they do a terrific or mediocre job in diffusing the light so that it isn�t uncomfortable to view (see example of each in the figure below). The compact fluorescent light torchieres that initially replaced them were massive, and both styles would could fall over relatively easily with serious consequences if they fell on a person, pet, or valuable object.įortunately, while many of today�s floor lamps still have metal or glass bowls, there are quite a few with white plastic shades (labeled as �frosted� in some lamps). The original halogen torchieres had heavy metal bowls on top with relatively small bases. The solution, in this case, has been to wait long enough until the modern lamps wouldn�t pose as much of a danger! The big problem is that unless you want to physically attach the base to the floor, which usually is not practical, or to suspend multiple strands of string or cable between the central pole and one or two walls, which would look silly, you are limited to putting small wedges under the base to at least encourage it to fall in one chosen direction as in the accompanying figure. The base is usually heavy enough to make them prefer to wobble back rather than falling, but if they swing out too far from the center, they will continue to fall all the way: THWACK! ![]() ![]() However, since these typically consist of a thin pole on a base and a wide bowl on the top, they have the potential to fall like a blunt axe onto objects or people that are 5-6 feet away from the lamp. Well, I�ve recently revisited these two issues and here are my recommendations. In fact, if you look at an online photo gallery that I prepared several years ago about special challenges and their solutions, you�ll see that I basically took a pass on the floor lamps and plants and said there wasn�t all that much that could be done in some cases. However, I�ve always been stumped by how to deal with tall floor lamps and houseplants, which would look terrible if braced by the ordinary approaches. For many years, I�ve been bracing any furniture tall enough to hurt the shortest members of the household (including those with four legs), and have been sticking down objects on surfaces that could fall or fly off and cause injury or damage. ![]()
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