touch lamps

Touch Lamps - Are They Making a Comeback?

Lots of decorators will put lamps in the corners of the room to brighten them up, as well as the room. If this is something that you are thinking about, you will need to decide on the style as well as the type of the lamp that you need. This information about touch lamps, should help you do just that.

A touch lamp will make a beautiful addition to any room helping set the mood and providing functional lighting. For years we had to contend with switches to turn lights on and off, but no more, not since the invention of touch technology. So how do touch lamps work?

Both are a type of switch. The traditional switch that needs to be pushed, flipped, or turned is a mechanical switch and the action on the switch causes the connection to be made or broken. This type of switch has been around for years and is fairly resistant to damage.

Touch switches are sensitive to human touch a technology that's been around for years in a variety of forms. Temperature has been a common activation element for many types of switches other than lamps.

The human body is usually warmer than the surrounding air so it can be used as a trigger point. Exterior lights come on when they sense the heat of a human body, touch lamps turn on when they sense the heat, and security technology uses heat, even buttons such as those found in an elevator can be heat sensitive.

Touch sensitive lamps actually use another property of the body called capacitance which is the capacity of an object to hold electrons. The lamp has its own capacitance. For the lamp to be turned on you come along and touch the lamp which changes the electrons by your body adding to the capacity. The circuit detects this change and the light is activated.

To use a touch lamp seems pretty straightforward. You touch the lamp and it comes on. Touch it again and it goes out. But actually the technology that allows that to happen is rather complicated.

Most touch lamps have three different brightness settings without the use of a three way bulb. The brightness is changed by changing the duty cycle of the power that is reaching the bulb.

There are several components that make up the touch lamp - The metal antenna, the touch sense circuit, the flip flop memory bit, the high voltage electronic switch, the low voltage power supply, and the light bulb. A touch lamp uses both static electricity and electric current.

The metal shell of the lamp acts as the antenna. The touch sense circuitry gives the antenna a positive charge imbalance and then a negative charge....

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