Now that is quite scary! Sounds very similar to the Sungold lamps of the 80s! My Nan had one pop the lighting fuse many moons ago!

It is!

My Dad always used to buy cheap lamps and it was never worth it! More often than not there'd be no fusing, like this example, so the whole house would be plunged into darkness with a bang and a flash every time one failed. I remember a 40W R40 spot exploding in my bedroom when I was little with one hell of a flash, showering hot glass everywhere! Scared the crap out of me! Same thing happened with an unfused candle lamp. The worst one though was several years ago when my mum leaned over to switch one of the table lamps on in the front room and with a bang the envelope from the candle lamp ejected out of the fitting, just missed her and landed on the carpet over the other side of the room! It had completely deatched from the cap! Must have arced over inside the cap!

Bloody hell fire Eliot! Luckily for us I'm sure most of our lamps at home were either branded or supermarket own being made by the leading names anyway! Another one that makes me twitchy is that most 15w Pygmies appear to be unfused too! Also back when I used to use 300w PAR56s on the disco, they'd often take a fuse or a triac out on the controller! All this makes EOL metal halides going pop seem pretty insignifficent!

My mum had a Status candle bulb go boom, taking out the 60A main braker . When were fuses for gas filled lamps made mandatory? I ask because I have a REALLY old Mazda 100W gas filled lamp (it's the same size as a Thorn 150W lamp) and it's fuseless

Are these fuses mandatory? I have loads of GLS will take a close look as I never gave this a thought, but do remember as a kid and still seeing these glass type fuses either sand filled or not and in some cases just a thin bare wire which acted as a fuse will have to look one out to show.

I'd expect they would be, but I don't know for definite! The glass fuses you remember will be the Ballotini fuses which are filled with tiny glass beads, if a secondary arc were to form across the fuse the glass beads melt and quench the arc! Always something worth looking out for when buying lamps, as generally if the manufacturer has chosen Ballotini fuses for their lamps (which are the most costly), the rest of the lamp is usually of good construction!

Eliot, I agree the Ballotini fuse was a replacement for the type just a tube with fuse wire no beads at that time and you could easily see the fuse wire and if it had blown. Remember at school drawing a picture of a GLS lamp for science and including the fuse only to be told I was silly for doing that, bloody teachers havent got a clue, such is life.

Ah right I see! A separately enclosed fuse but with no beads! Very interesting!

Teachers, they'll never accept that they're wrong!

Unfortunately I never even came close to anything involving lamps and lighting at school. I felt sure that learning how to wire a plug top was still a requirement in secondary eduction but that wasn't covered either! Didn't bother me personally as I already had the knowledge but what about everyone else!?

Hi have a little look at the lamp put up showing fuses sorry they are out of focus.