![\"2014-10-23](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/2014-10-23-13.57.10.jpg\")
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As you can see, they are\u00a0shaped like\u00a0pitchers. To put a light bulb in or take it out, you have to get a ladder,\u00a0lean over the\u00a0lampshade, and extract or insert the lighbulb from above.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately,\u00a0since the lampshades are open from above, this means that dust keeps falling into them. This is what the lightbulb looks like when you take it out:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Look at the\u00a0crust of dust on the base. Ew. And that’s just the\u00a0bulb itself. The inside walls and bottom of the shade were\u00a0even more gross.\u00a0It doesn’t really come out clearly in photos just how disgusting they were, so I’ve not put any photos here. But it was awful.\u00a0Some of the shades had\u00a0a year’s worth of dead insects\u00a0resting at the base – moths and honeybees that had flown too close to the light and\u00a0had their wings singed. CFLs\u00a0are better than incandescent bulbs, but still generate enough heat to knock out a small insect.<\/p>\n This called for a\u00a0day of cleaning. These were my tools:<\/p>\n Two toothbrushes, paper napkins\u00a0(I really need to get a roll of kitchen towels for this house), and a bottle of Hawaiian white rum (made in Moradabad).<\/p>\n I’m so posh that I only drink imported liquor, and use the Indian stuff only to clean things with. Jokes aside, this was a bottle that hadn’t been opened for about eight years, and when we did open it, we found it had gone bad. Since then I’ve been using it to clean bicycle gears, window panes, and on Diwali, lampshades. The dark part at the bit is\u00a0sedimentary dirt.<\/p>\n After some trial and error, I\u00a0found that the ideal way to clean the\u00a0lampshades\u00a0was to first brush inside with a dry toothbrush to dislodge the dirt, then\u00a0dip the other\u00a0toothbrush into the ‘rum’, and brush inside the lampshade again, and then to wipe\u00a0the dirt off with a paper napkin. Since this was\u00a0probably the first time the shades had been cleaned in a couple of years (if not more), this is what the napkin looked like at the end of\u00a0cleaning two shades:<\/p>\n I eventually\u00a0finished cleaning lampshades\u00a0for about half the house, which took\u00a0at least ten tissues, and replacing blown out lightbulbs (where nobody had realised they were blown out) with\u00a0new ones.<\/p>\n By the end of this, the combination of new lightbulbs\u00a0and\u00a0cleaner lampshades meant that my parents’ home was\u00a0much better illuminated. Coincidentally, all this happened on Diwali, but I hadn’t planned it that way. It just happened to be the first holiday where I had free time at\u00a0home since\u00a0the time I bought a ladder to do carry out this exercise.<\/p>\n Anyway, the entire exercise taught me two things. The first is that\u00a0some lampshade designs are far better than others. If the\u00a0top is closed instead of the bottom, the lampshade stops being such a dust trap. For example, these lampshades in my parents’ living room turned out to be much easier to clean:<\/p>\n Unfortunately, this design\u00a0comes with problems of its own. Specifically, since you have to screw the bulb in from\u00a0below instead of above, you can’t hold it from the base. So, if you’re\u00a0doing this with an\u00a0Osram CFL, you have to\u00a0hold the bulb by the lamp instead of the base, and in this position you risk\u00a0cracking the glass.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>Eurgh.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n