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I saw this ceiling lamp on the internet, and I thought I would try to build it. I'm trying to be more DIY, but anything related to electrical is new to me.

This question is related to the electrical part of this lamp. Please assume that I know nothing about electricity.

A few questions:

  1. What cables or accessories do I need so that the bulbs hang several from the piece of wood? I was thinking of buying several of these, but then I would need to join all that wiring. And that's my 2nd question.
  2. How do I join all those electric wires into one so that I can connect?
  3. Last but not least, are these cables strong enough to hold the glass bottle?

We used to have another ceiling light here, so the eletric part in the ceiling already exists.

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  • i would use 5-slot wago connectors, aka level-lock terminals. more compact than wing nuts, less work, easier to rework. also beware that cheap led filament lights are flicker city, which you don't want in an eating or even formal sitting area, unless watered down heavily by other, non-flickering lighting. the worst are off 66% of the time, and slightly better designed ones are still off 33% of the time. i don't know of any with a built-in DC driver. – dandavis Apr 29 at 20:31
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My concern would be heat in the bottles. I would definitely use LEDs - incandescent would produce way too much heat. An ordinary mass-produced, UL-listed item will have engineers figuring out heat dissipation requirements and testers to make sure it all works the way it is supposed to. With a homemade setup, you are on your own, so definitely design conservatively as much as you can. A glass bottle may seem little different from a common chandelier "globe". However, a glass bottle is designed to be sturdy and, to a limited degree, to actually keep heat out (i.e., to keep contents cold for a little while after removal from the refrigerator), so it may not dissipate heat as well as you might expect it to.

If it were me, prior to assembling the entire contraption, I would put one light in a bottle and hook it up and measure the temperature on the outside of the bottle. If it gets "too hot" (I know that's vague, not sure at the moment what temperature that would be), better to find that out with a couple hours of testing at a normal height than the hard way (shattered glass) above your hear in the middle of a party. Many materials will also suffer degradation from repeated heat/cool cycles, so heat dissipation is a long-term, cumulative (to some degree) issue.

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    In addition, uneven heating can be bad; the area around the bulb will heat up more than the area around the neck, and that puts strain on the glass. – user3757614 Apr 29 at 15:22
  • For what its worth, those "old timey" decorative filament bulbs are typically very low wattage and don't produce a lot of heat. Of course, I'd still choose LED - the LED filament revolution has given us some very attractive options. – JPhi1618 Apr 29 at 16:03
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    I actually think incandescents would fare much better in hot applications than most LEDs. They're designed to run extremely hot, and are built for it, whereas LEDs are not -- their electronics like to be cool. But that said, I don't think the glass bottles are as good of an insulator as you're thinking. If thick glass insulated well, we'd just do that for windows rather than bothering with double panes and noble gas filling. – Nate Strickland Apr 29 at 16:04
  • @JPhi1618 But if they're incandescent and don't produce much heat then they don't produce much light either. My impression is that this chandelier is to be functional. – manassehkatz Apr 29 at 16:06
  • @manassehkatz, right, but in practice many of these are for aesthetic more than lighting. Depends on what OP is going for - real light or an art piece that happens to give off a little light. – JPhi1618 Apr 29 at 16:07
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Glass bottles are not going to be that much heavier than some of their lampshades so that will be fine.

At the top there will be 2 or 3 wires per pendant. run them all to an electrical box and connect them all in parallel (matching the colors) plus a cable to the wiring in the ceiling box, route that cable along the chain that supports the entire thing.

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