Today I converted a couple of antique center-draft oil lamps, turning them into electric lamps. The cost was $8 each (plus the cost of a light bulb). It took maybe two minutes. No modifications were necessary to the lamp. And it’s completely reversible, if for some reason I want to burn oil in those lamps again.
If you’re not into oil lamps, you may rightly think “big deal”. But if you look, you’ll see a lot of electrified oil lamps for sale in antique shops, and these lamps come in two flavors. The more heinous are the DIY hatchet jobs where somebody literally drills a hole through the oil font, for the electrical cord to pass, thus making sure the oil lamp will never again hold or burn oil. The less heinous are those where the original oil burner assembly has been removed, and replaced by a modern piece that is wired. The original oil-burner top is inevitably lost, but those can be restored to burning oil if you can find the right original top for them. So to get a conversion that a) doesn’t damage the lamp and b) doesn’t lose any original parts — that’s a good thing.
My only “cheat” is that I had emptied these lamps months ago, and had let the lamp oil evaporate from the wicks. So the round wicks in these center-draft lamps were already dry and no longer smelled of lamp oil.
The key part for this oil-to-electricity conversion is a candelabra-base light socket and switch, from Lowes:
Source: Lowes.com.
Turns out, the plug and switch will fit through the central draft tube of a Rayo oil lamp with room to spare. Remove the flame spreader, slide that whole assembly, plug-first, down the top of the draft tube. Let the metal prongs on the light socket lightly grip the inside of the top of the tube. The bulb sits right where the oil flame used to be. (Wire the flame spreader to the underside of the lamp so it can’t get lost.)
You need to raise up the lamp base about an eighth of an inch, to give clearance for the electrical cord, which simply runs out from under the lamp base. Currently I’m using folded-up sheets of paper. I’ll eventually cut a couple of nice-looking thin pieces of wood to do the job.
Choose an LED bulb with a candelabra base and amber glass, put some sort of frosted or opaque chimney or shade on the lamp, flick the switch, and you end up with a nice, clean electrical impersonation of a steadily-burning oil lamp. Alternatively, with a different bulb, you could have the worlds classiest night-light, as night-light bulbs fit a candelabra socket.
This only works on center-draft oil lamps, not on flat-wick oil lamps. The presence of that central draft tube is what allows you to make the conversion without butchering the lamp in the process, or having an electrical cord hang down the length of the oil lamp. The electrical plug, at its widest, is 1 3/64″, as shown.
One final nicety is that any candelabra-based bulb will do. If the 40-watt-equivalent LED amber-glass bulb I’m using now is too bright, or too dim, there are plenty of options available. (Or plug a dimmer onto the end of the lamp cord and use a dim-able bulb.)
If nothing else, this highlights what LEDs have done for home lighting. The socket and wiring are designed to take up to a 60-watt traditional incandescent bulb. But this 40-watt-light-equivalent LED bulb draws just 4 watts, and produces a similarly reduced amount of waste heat. The result is that the socket and wiring are vastly over-specified for the amount of heat and electrical current they actually get when used with an LED bulb.
In any case, I rarely have a DIY project go this smoothly. I was in the process of trying to sell them on Ebay, when my wife asked why I didn’t convert them to electricity. And that’s when I realized that, unlike flat-wick lamps that are converted to electricity, there was no need to butcher these lamps to make the conversion, as they already have a big hollow tube running right through the center of the lamp.
No muss, no fuss. No drilling holes in antiques. It only took one trip to the hardware store, and a couple of minute of time. And it would take just a minute or two to remove the electrical add-on, and return these to being oil-burning lamps.
