Jansjo Light Users -- Read This

I had posted similar information in another thread, but it was quite buried. Thus, I'm giving it a proper thread here:

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I know many of us here use the Jansjo LED lamps for our lighting of choice for coin photography. I had been using them for about a year before I even joined this site -- to find (happily) that when I got here, many others had also discovered them! For $9.99 each at IKEA it is hard to beat the value of these lamps, and the low profile light source coupled with the completely adjustable "snake like" tubing is great.

Many of the older Jansjo lamps (those I purchased 6 months ago or earlier) have very finicky switches. For the first week or two, they work perfectly. Then, over time, I notice dimming or flickering of the light. It turns out that all of these issues are a problem of the switch, not of the light itself. The style of these switches is a "pinch-style". In other words, some metal teeth on each end of the switch are simply "pinched" down into the wire to make a connection. This is a pretty minimal connection, and causes grief over time.

BUT, DON'T THROW OUT YOUR FINICKY IKEA JANSJO LAMPS!

I found that I could make a $3 fix to them by replacing the cord switch. So, you can make a trip to your nearest Home Depot, Lowes, Menards, Fleet Farm, etc. and look for the Leviton Single Pole Cord Switch (Cat. No. 5410). You can get them for around $3 at almost any home improvement location with a full line of electrical switches. They take about 5 minutes to install, and these switches are much more robust with screw-down posts, around which you wrap the stripped wires. To install these replacement switches, the only way I have found to remove the original IKEA switches was by breaking them off with a hammer -- which I wanted to do anyway to let off a little frustration at the light flickering.



If you are not near a larger home improvement store, you can also order them online at Amazon, or even look on ebay. They are found with a simple search of "Leviton 5410".

Because the IKEA Jansjo lamps are rated at an almost absurd number of hours for the LED itself, I am happy to have three "resurrected" Jansjo lamps from a simply fix. Also, it's simply less wasteful than just tossing them!

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POST-SCRIPT: If you have purchased your lamps in the previous 6 months or so, you may not be experiencing any of these issues. The most recent versions of these lamps that I purchased have newer switch mechanisms, and I have not had any problems with dimming or flickering.